Recognition versus Recall

The issue of Recall versus Recognition is one of the oldest debates of advertising research according to experts like Alexander Biel. It started when Starch and Gallup introduced these measures in the 1930s. It became confused with other arguments after Schwerin introduced Persuasion measures into copy testing in the late 1940s. It was extended to left-brain/right-brain theories by Krugman and related specifically to his view of how print and TV advertising works, in the mid 1970s. Zielske extended the brain hemispheric theories to emotive/rational advertising in 1982. In the same year Gibson published his famous paper “Not Recall.” In 1992 John Rice renewed this argument based on hemispheric theories in South Africa.These are famous names, known to most researchers and advertisers. Few people have actually read what these authors really said, or critically inspected the empirical basis for their arguments. The fact is that there exists virtually no empirical evidence, nor consistency of views among these papers.This paper first reviews these papers in terms of their conclusions and empiricism. Then scientists' current views of brain hemispheric theories and of memory are reviewed. Finally, the results of three experiments conducted to examine comparative measures for Recall and Recognition, all on a larger scale than any of the previous experiments, are discussed.