Faded Fonts How Difficulty in Image Processing Promotes Sensitivity to Missing Information
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Published:
Mar 30, 2019
Keywords:
fonts visibility signs
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Abstract
Faded fonts on billboards and signage causes awareness of missing information. In this research, we highlight the importance of fonts in advertising and wayfinding and how it impacts sensitivity to missing information. Across two studies, we demonstrate that disfluency caused by faded fonts can reduce omission neglect. Study 1 establishes the basis for consequences of disfluency on omission neglect as well as its effects on judgments. Study 2 demonstrates that disfluency increases awareness of missing information by reducing response time differences for correctly identifying previously presented versus missing information. Taken together, the two studies demonstrate that disfluency increases sensitivity to absent information. Practical implications to signage and theoretical contributions to research on omission neglect are discussed.
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References
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.01.006
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https://doi.org/10.1201/9780203457412
Coulter, K. S., & Coulter, R. A. (2005). Size does matter: The effects of magnitude representation congruency on price perceptions and purchase likelihood. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15, 64-76.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1501_9
Davis, D. W. (1955). Basic text in advertising. Pleasantville, NY: Printers Ink Books.
Dennis, C., Newman, A., Michon, R., Brakus, J. J., & Wright, L. T. (2010). The mediating effects of perception and emotion: Digital signage in mall atmospherics. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 17, 205-215.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2010.03.009
Diemand-Yauman, C., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Vaughan, E. B. (2011). Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition, 118, 111-115.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012
Dillon, A. (2004). Designing usable electronic text: Ergonomic aspects of human information usage. Boca Raton, FL: CRC press.
https://doi.org/10.1201/9781420025170
Doyle, J. R., & Bottomley, P. A. (2006). Dressed for the occasion: Font-product congruity in the perception of logotype. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 16, 112-123.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1602_2
Dynel, M. (2011). Blending the incongruity-resolution model and the conceptual integration theory: The case of blends in pictorial advertising. International Review of Pragmatics, 3, 59-83.
https://doi.org/10.1163/187731011X561009
Fazio, R. H. (1990). A practical guide to the use of response time in social psychological research. In C. Hendrick and M. S. Clark (Eds.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology. Newbury Park: Sage.
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.07.006
Hernandez, I., & Preston, J. L. (2013). Disfluency disrupts the confirmation bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 178- 182.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.08.010
Huddleston, P. T., Behe, B. K., Driesener, C., & Minahan, S. (2018). Inside-outside: Using eye-tracking to investigate search-choice processes in the retail environment. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 43, 85-93.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2018.03.006
Juni, S., & Gross, J. S. (2008). Emotional and persuasive perception of fonts. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 106, 35-42.
https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.106.1.35-42
Kardes, F. R., Posavac, S. S., Silvera, D., Cronley, M. L., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Schertzer, S., ... & Chandrashekaran, M. (2006). Debiasing omission neglect. Journal of Business Research, 59, 786-792.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.01.016
Kim, M., & Lennon, S. (2008). The effects of visual and verbal information on attitudes and purchase intentions in internet shopping. Psychology & Marketing, 25, 146-178.
https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.20204
Marlow, J. E. (2001). The last gasp: Cigarette advertising on billboards in the 1990s. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 25, 38-54.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859901025001004
Muthukrishnan, A. V., & Ramaswami, S. (1999). Contextual effects on the revision of evaluative judgments: An extension of the omission-detection framework. Journal of Consumer Research, 26, 70-84.
https://doi.org/10.1086/209551
Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). The secret life of fluency. Trends in cognitive sciences, 12, 237-241. Park, Y. W., Herr, P. M., & Kim, B. C. (2016). The effect of disfluency on consumer perceptions of information security. Marketing Letters, 27, 525-535.
Pieters, R., Warlop, L., & Wedel, M. (2002). Breaking through the clutter: Benefits of advertisement originality and familiarity for brand attention and memory. Management Science, 48, 765-781.
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.48.6.765.192
Pieters, R., & Wedel, M. (2004). Attention capture and transfer in advertising: Brand, pictorial, and text-size effects. Journal of Marketing, 68, 36-50.
https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.2.36.27794
Reber, R., Winkielman, P., & Schwarz, N. (1998). Effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments. Psychological Science, 9, 45-48.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00008
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., & Sansone, C. (1991). Remembering less and inferring more: Effects of time of judgment on inferences about unknown attributes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 546-554.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.61.4.546
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., & Herr, P. M. (1992). The role of prior knowledge and missing information in multiattribute evaluation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 51, 76-91.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(92)90005-R
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., Posavac, S. S., & Houghton, D. C. (1997). Contextual influences on judgment based on limited information. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 69, 251-264.
https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1997.2686
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., Houghton, D. C., Ho, E. A., & Posavac, S. S. (2003). Overestimating the importance of the given information in multiattribute consumer judgment. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 13, 289-300.
https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327663JCP1303_10
Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14, 332-348.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1404_2
Sinfield, D. (2014). The semiotics of business signage: How typography is used in impoverished and deprived areas of New Zealand. The International Journal of the Image, 4, 25-32.
https://doi.org/10.18848/2154-8560/CGP/v04i04/44144
Song, H., & Schwarz, N. (2008). If it's hard to read, it's hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation. Psychological Science, 19, 986-988.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02189.x
Sundar, A., Gonsales, F., & Schafer, G. (2018). Synchronicity in signage promotes a sense of belonging. Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding, 2(2), 30–40.
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2470-9670.2018.v2.i2.a30
Sundar, A., Dinsmore, J., Paik, S.-H., and Kardes, F. (2016). Metaphorical communication, self-presentation, and consumer inference in service encounters. Journal of Business Research, 72(1), 136–146.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.08.029
Sundar, A. (2018). Brand touchpoints. Hauppague, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Taylor, C. R., Franke, G. R., & Bang, H. K. (2006). Use and effectiveness of billboards: perspectives from selective-perception theory and retail-gravity models. Journal of Advertising, 35, 21-34.
https://doi.org/10.2753/JOA0091-3367350402
Toma, C. L. (2010). Perceptions of trustworthiness online: The role of visual and textual information. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 13-22). Savannah, GA: CSCW.
https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718923
Unkelbach, C., Fiedler, K., & Freytag, P. (2007). Information repetition in evaluative judgments: Easy to monitor, hard to control. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103, 37-52.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.12.002
Visual, P. (2016, April 27). Common signage problems and how to deal with them. Retrieved November 7, 2018, from http://pbvisualcom.au/how-to-deal-with-4-common-signage-problems/
Wilson, R. T., & Till, B. D. (2008). Airport advertising effectiveness: An exploratory field study. Journal of Advertising, 37, 59-72.
https://doi.org/10.2753/JOA0091-3367370105
Wu, R., Escoe, B., & Kardes, F. (2018). You are not as smart as you think you are: Effects of self-perceived knowledge on consumer information processing and decision making. ACR North American Advances.
Wu, R., Shah, E., & Kardes, F. (2016). Disfluency effects on inference and evaluation. ACR North American Advances.
Yoon, A., Choi, S. M., Hong, J., Hahn, D., Kang, M., & Lee, S. (2014). Motivational signage promotes physical activity on a college campus. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 46, 108.
https://doi.org/10.1249/01.mss.0000493492.56108.b6
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02062.x
Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., Epley, N., & Eyre, R. N. (2007). Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 569-576.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.136.4.569
Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Epley, N. (2013). Disfluency prompts analytic thinking—But not always greater accuracy: Response to Thompson et al. (2013). Cognition, 128, 252-255.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.01.006
Bargh, J., & Chartrand, T. (2000). The mind in the middle: A practical guide to priming and automaticity research. In H. T. Reis and C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Castro, C., & Horberry, T. (Eds.). (2004). The human factor of transport signs. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
https://doi.org/10.1201/9780203457412
Coulter, K. S., & Coulter, R. A. (2005). Size does matter: The effects of magnitude representation congruency on price perceptions and purchase likelihood. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15, 64-76.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1501_9
Davis, D. W. (1955). Basic text in advertising. Pleasantville, NY: Printers Ink Books.
Dennis, C., Newman, A., Michon, R., Brakus, J. J., & Wright, L. T. (2010). The mediating effects of perception and emotion: Digital signage in mall atmospherics. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 17, 205-215.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2010.03.009
Diemand-Yauman, C., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Vaughan, E. B. (2011). Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition, 118, 111-115.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012
Dillon, A. (2004). Designing usable electronic text: Ergonomic aspects of human information usage. Boca Raton, FL: CRC press.
https://doi.org/10.1201/9781420025170
Doyle, J. R., & Bottomley, P. A. (2006). Dressed for the occasion: Font-product congruity in the perception of logotype. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 16, 112-123.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1602_2
Dynel, M. (2011). Blending the incongruity-resolution model and the conceptual integration theory: The case of blends in pictorial advertising. International Review of Pragmatics, 3, 59-83.
https://doi.org/10.1163/187731011X561009
Fazio, R. H. (1990). A practical guide to the use of response time in social psychological research. In C. Hendrick and M. S. Clark (Eds.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology. Newbury Park: Sage.
Hayes, A. F. (2012). PROCESS: A versatile computational tool for observed variable mediation, moderation, and conditional process modeling [White paper]. Retrieved from http://www.afhayes.com/public/process2012.pdf
Henderson, P. W., Giese, J. L., & Cote, J. A. (2004). Impression management using typeface design. Journal of Marketing, 68, 60-72. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.4.60.42736
Hernandez, J. M. C., Han, X., & Kardes, F. R. (2014). Effects of the perceived diagnosticity of presented attribute and brand name information on sensitivity to missing information. Journal of Business Research, 67, 874-881.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.07.006
Hernandez, I., & Preston, J. L. (2013). Disfluency disrupts the confirmation bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 178- 182.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.08.010
Huddleston, P. T., Behe, B. K., Driesener, C., & Minahan, S. (2018). Inside-outside: Using eye-tracking to investigate search-choice processes in the retail environment. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 43, 85-93.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2018.03.006
Juni, S., & Gross, J. S. (2008). Emotional and persuasive perception of fonts. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 106, 35-42.
https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.106.1.35-42
Kardes, F. R., Posavac, S. S., Silvera, D., Cronley, M. L., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Schertzer, S., ... & Chandrashekaran, M. (2006). Debiasing omission neglect. Journal of Business Research, 59, 786-792.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.01.016
Kim, M., & Lennon, S. (2008). The effects of visual and verbal information on attitudes and purchase intentions in internet shopping. Psychology & Marketing, 25, 146-178.
https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.20204
Marlow, J. E. (2001). The last gasp: Cigarette advertising on billboards in the 1990s. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 25, 38-54.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859901025001004
Muthukrishnan, A. V., & Ramaswami, S. (1999). Contextual effects on the revision of evaluative judgments: An extension of the omission-detection framework. Journal of Consumer Research, 26, 70-84.
https://doi.org/10.1086/209551
Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). The secret life of fluency. Trends in cognitive sciences, 12, 237-241. Park, Y. W., Herr, P. M., & Kim, B. C. (2016). The effect of disfluency on consumer perceptions of information security. Marketing Letters, 27, 525-535.
Pieters, R., Warlop, L., & Wedel, M. (2002). Breaking through the clutter: Benefits of advertisement originality and familiarity for brand attention and memory. Management Science, 48, 765-781.
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.48.6.765.192
Pieters, R., & Wedel, M. (2004). Attention capture and transfer in advertising: Brand, pictorial, and text-size effects. Journal of Marketing, 68, 36-50.
https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.2.36.27794
Reber, R., Winkielman, P., & Schwarz, N. (1998). Effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments. Psychological Science, 9, 45-48.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00008
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., & Sansone, C. (1991). Remembering less and inferring more: Effects of time of judgment on inferences about unknown attributes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 546-554.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.61.4.546
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., & Herr, P. M. (1992). The role of prior knowledge and missing information in multiattribute evaluation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 51, 76-91.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(92)90005-R
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., Posavac, S. S., & Houghton, D. C. (1997). Contextual influences on judgment based on limited information. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 69, 251-264.
https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1997.2686
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., Houghton, D. C., Ho, E. A., & Posavac, S. S. (2003). Overestimating the importance of the given information in multiattribute consumer judgment. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 13, 289-300.
https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327663JCP1303_10
Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14, 332-348.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1404_2
Sinfield, D. (2014). The semiotics of business signage: How typography is used in impoverished and deprived areas of New Zealand. The International Journal of the Image, 4, 25-32.
https://doi.org/10.18848/2154-8560/CGP/v04i04/44144
Song, H., & Schwarz, N. (2008). If it's hard to read, it's hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation. Psychological Science, 19, 986-988.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02189.x
Sundar, A., Gonsales, F., & Schafer, G. (2018). Synchronicity in signage promotes a sense of belonging. Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding, 2(2), 30–40.
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2470-9670.2018.v2.i2.a30
Sundar, A., Dinsmore, J., Paik, S.-H., and Kardes, F. (2016). Metaphorical communication, self-presentation, and consumer inference in service encounters. Journal of Business Research, 72(1), 136–146.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.08.029
Sundar, A. (2018). Brand touchpoints. Hauppague, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Taylor, C. R., Franke, G. R., & Bang, H. K. (2006). Use and effectiveness of billboards: perspectives from selective-perception theory and retail-gravity models. Journal of Advertising, 35, 21-34.
https://doi.org/10.2753/JOA0091-3367350402
Toma, C. L. (2010). Perceptions of trustworthiness online: The role of visual and textual information. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 13-22). Savannah, GA: CSCW.
https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718923
Unkelbach, C., Fiedler, K., & Freytag, P. (2007). Information repetition in evaluative judgments: Easy to monitor, hard to control. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103, 37-52.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.12.002
Visual, P. (2016, April 27). Common signage problems and how to deal with them. Retrieved November 7, 2018, from http://pbvisualcom.au/how-to-deal-with-4-common-signage-problems/
Wilson, R. T., & Till, B. D. (2008). Airport advertising effectiveness: An exploratory field study. Journal of Advertising, 37, 59-72.
https://doi.org/10.2753/JOA0091-3367370105
Wu, R., Escoe, B., & Kardes, F. (2018). You are not as smart as you think you are: Effects of self-perceived knowledge on consumer information processing and decision making. ACR North American Advances.
Wu, R., Shah, E., & Kardes, F. (2016). Disfluency effects on inference and evaluation. ACR North American Advances.
Yoon, A., Choi, S. M., Hong, J., Hahn, D., Kang, M., & Lee, S. (2014). Motivational signage promotes physical activity on a college campus. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 46, 108.
https://doi.org/10.1249/01.mss.0000493492.56108.b6