National Tsing Hua University

Institute of Learning Sciences

The Processing of Humor Advertisement: Evidence from Eye Movement

1 1 2
Yen-Lin Lee, Yu-Chen Chan, and Hsueh-Chih Chen
1
Institute of Learning Sciences, National Tsing Hua University
2
Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University

Introduction
Verbo-pictorial humor advertisements induce deeper thinking and invokes the feeling of amusement.
A number of studies have been vastly conducted within the cognitive framework of verbo-pictorial
metaphor in advertising. To date, however, there has been far less research on the interaction be-
tween advertisement types and verbo-pictorial type using eye-tracker. The present study aimed to in-
vestigate the influence of types of verbo-pictorial ads and humor by the analysis of eye movement.
Fixation count denotes the total number of fixations detected on each AOI. Run count was defined
as the number of times that the eyes moved to the AOI after a saccade that originated beyond that re-
gion. (Simola et al. 2013)

Method
Participants
Sixty-seven undergraduate and graduation students of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan (33
males, 34 females; age range = 18-30 years, M = 22.49, SD = 2.35).

Apparatus
During recording participants sat comfortably seats and their eye movements were recording with
SR Research EyeLink 2000. Position of right eye was sampled with 1000 Hz. The stimuli were pre-
sented on a 19-inch display from the eye-tracker distance of 60 cm.

Experimental design and stimuli

Experimental design was 2 (advertisement type: humor and literality) X 2 (stimulus type: slogan and Fixation map
pictorial information) within-subject design. Each ad is pair, including humor and literality vision.
Every participant received 8 stimuli of ads (1024 X 768), including 4 humor ads and 4 literality ads.
Participants reviewed the stimuli in counterbalanced and randomized order on computer screen.

Experimental Procedure
After watched ad, participants were asked to rate the metaphor, comprehensibility, funniness and
persuasion of the stimuli on a 1 to 9 scale (1 = not metaphor/ incomprehensibility/ not funny/ not
persuasion at all, 9 = very metaphor/ very comprehensibility/ very funny/ very persuasion).

Heat map

Result
Eye Movement Data
Results revealed that pictorial information of humor ads was more fixation counts than literal ones
(Table 4); it represented that participants increased attention to pictorial information. Furthermore,
the run counts of humor ads in slogan and pictorial information were obviously more than those of
literal ones (Table 5); it’s required more processes of comprehension while watching humor ads.

Future Studies
The results will further provide cross-cultural comparisons across individualistic and collectivistic
cultures. Implications for how viewers integrated pictorial and textual information and applied re-
search and ad development by eye movement are discussed. Moreover, techniques of fMRI, MEG,
and EEG are suggested for brain mechanism of ads in different humor skills.

Acknowledgments
This research is partially supported by the "Identifying the Neural Substrates of the Ambiguity-
Humor Interaction: An fMRI study" of National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), sponsored by the
Ministry of Science and Technology under Grant no. NSC 102-2410-H-007-072

Department of Institute of Learning Sciences