At the Intersection of Motivational Relevance and Website Visual Complexity

This study investigated how resource allocation to and encoding of irrelevant peripheral information (advertisements) varied as a function of the emotional tone of a central event (movie clip) and website complexity (number of advertisements). Secondary task reaction times (STRTs) and ad recognition accuracy were used to test the predictions. Two competing hypotheses – a memory narrowing hypothesis and an escape hypothesis – were posed to explain encoding of advertisements paired with negative arousing movie clips at the highest level of website complexity. The results were more supportive of the memory narrowing hypothesis; participants had more resources while viewing positive rather than negative movies and advertisements were encoded better when they were presented with positive rather than negative movie clips. However, for calm movie clips this difference showed at the lowest level of website complexity, but gradually diminished as the level of complexity increased.