Recognition Versus Recall as Measures of Television Commercial Forgetting

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising is a central research interest of both academic and industry researchers (Leckenby and Plununer 1983; Ostlund 1978; Stewart, Furse, and Kozak 1983). When effectiveness is measured in terms of leaming and memory, recall and recognition are common dependent variables (Stewart et al. 1985). We report the second in a series of experiments on recognition as a dependent variable in the study of the learning and forgetting of television commercials. The first experiment (Singh and Rothschild 1983a) studied learning curves as a function of repetition levels, commercial length, and number of distractors; the second experiment examined forgetting curves as a function of repetition, message length, and the passage of time. Both studies considered the virtues of recognition as a measure of memory, and its sensitivity and discriminability. The studies also compared recognition with the more popular measure of recall. The two experiments were undertaken in response to the ever-increasing disen-