The Processing of Information in the Young Consumer: The Impact of Cognitive Developmental Stage on Television, Radio and Print Advertising

This study, as an extension of previous research looking at children's responses to television advertising, compared their response to radio and print advertising in addition to television. They were exposed to simulated ads for a fictitious product and their response was measured by their ability to correctly identify the package they had seen or heard about from an array. The children were classified into cognitive stage by use of a Piagetian conservation task. It was expected that older children would perform better than younger children, and this was confirmed. It was also expected that younger children would have more difficulty in the radio condition than in either the television or print condition. This was based on the argument that the radio situation constituted an inter modal recall task, while the television and print situations constituted an intramodal recognition task. Surprisingly, this expectation was not confirmed which was argued to be suggestive of greater cognitive ability than previously supposed. In addition, underlying attentional strategies in terms of central versus incidental information were explored.