5.

1 Learning & Memory

Welcome back to this course in Neuromarketing and Consumer Neuroscience.

Today, we will talk about learning and memory. As we will see, there are
several ways in which we have learning and memory. And memory comes in
many forms. And as consumers we are influenced by different kinds of
memory. But before we do that let's take an example. What I'd like to do is to
show you some objects on the screen. And I want you to pay attention to the
objects and try to learn all the objects as they are there. The objects will
disappear in a few seconds so try to learn as many as you can. Here we go.
Now, how many objects do you remember? Try to write down as many objects
as you can. Now an additional question: where was the butterfly positioned? If
you remember, it was on the left top corner. Now let's have a look at the picture
again and see how many correct you have This exercise tells us that there is a
distinction between knowing what something is and knowing where something
is. So, knowing where the butterfly was is a, what we can call a spatial memory.
But knowing what something is requires you to know what the identity of the
object is. Now, let's go to some definitions about learning and memory.
Learning, on the one side, is the acquisition and containment of information.
Memory, on the other side, is the containment and use of that kind of
information for different purposes. Memory comes in many forms depending
on the duration of the memory. We have sensory memories that last for
milliseconds to seconds. We have working memory or short-term memory that
lasts for a few seconds. We have intermediate memory that works for
something like seconds minutes. And finally, we have long-term memory that
can span the entire lifespan. Let's take the example of working memory. This is
the ability to keep in mind a few s, sample items for a few seconds. So
remembering a phone number, for example, or the name of a person for up to
20 seconds. A related concept is what we call cognitive load. So, the more
information you tend to put into that short-term memory, the higher the
cognitive loads. And in a recent study here at the CBS we tested people's
cognitive load while they were reading financial reports. What we did during
the study was to manipulate the way in which we added or subtracted
information. So how much information people are reading, basically, in the
financial reports. The more information people read, the higher the cognitive
load we could observe. We looked at both pupil dilation and brain responses,
such as the theta activation in the frontal lobe. What we also observed is that
trained people had a lower cognitive load while they're reading the reports.
Let's have a look at a tentative scheme for how we can divide long-term
memory. As you can see in the figure here, we have what we can call
declarative long-term memory and non-declarative long-term memory.
Declarative long-term memory is what we can declare, basically what we can
say we know. We know which day it is. We know the meaning of a particular
word, but we also know what we experience yesterday. All of these are
conscious memories. So we can further subdivide the conscious memories
into semantic memories, which is about things and meanings of, of words. And
episodic memories, which is about episodes that we have experienced. On the
other side we have non-declarative memories, which is a host of different
memories ranging from procedural memories. So that would be learning how
to ride a bike or learning how to juggle. To priming experiments, such as the
effect of a single word on people's experience of something. Let's look at
episodic memory. We know that episodic memory, our ability to remember
what happened yesterday for example, depends on a structure. A collection of
structures in the medial temporal lobe. As you can see in this figure, there are
several structures that are packed together in a small region and area. Now
let's have a close look at the brain. And especially this part of the brain that we
call the medial temporal lobe. This is the part of the temporal lobe that is
toward the middle of the brain, hence, the name medial temporal lobe. As you
can see in the rotating brain here, there's a collection of structure that are
densely patched. For example, the red structure, which is the Temporal polar
cortex. We have the yellow structure, which is the Perirhinal cortex. The blue
structure is the Entorhinal cortex. The cyan structure is the Amygdala. The
green structure is the Hippocampus. And the purple is the Parahippocampal
cortex. All of these structures play important roles in functions such as
memory, novelty, and emotion. If we take a closer look at the hippocampus. We
can divide the hippocampus into two different structures, the frontal part and
the posterior part. So the front and the back part of the hippocampus. The front
part or the anterior part of the hippocampus receives signal from what we call
the ventral stream. This is concerned with object identity and object naming,
for example. The posterior part or the back part of the hippocampus receives
signals from the dorsal stream. Which is concerned with object position, but
also in general just position and, and how things are used. So as you can see,
the hippocampus is a convergence zone for object information. If we want to
study consumer memory, there are several ways in which we can do it. We
could just ask people. What did you experience yesterday? What do you think
about brand X or Y? What is your experience with a particular product? But if
you really want to understand consumer memory a bit more, then we should
focus on some particular questions. One of those questions is what we call the
top-of-mind question. Here we ask people, just name any brand you can think
of. And we rank the brands as they come on the lists. Those, the brands that
people think of the first receive the highest score, and so forth. Another way to
ask is what people call the subjective knowledge of brands, for example. Here,
people do a self-rating of how well they think that they know a brand. Finally,
we have the associative density tests. And this is a test where we ask people
what comes to mind when they are given a particular brand or product? And
we list the thoughts and feelings people have as they come to us. Overall,
when you compare the differences between preferences and subjective
knowledge, we see that there's a positive relationship. The more people tend to
know something, the better they like it. However, if we look at different brands,
we can see that, and these are just toy brands, we can see that there are
different effects. Most of the brands you can see here on the chart have a
positive relationship. But some of the brands, as you can see with Mega Bloks,
for example have a strange relationship. The relationship between subjective
knowledge and preference is positive until a certain point, after which it drops
again. This provides important clues for brand managers, for example. But also
for researchers about the relationship between a subjective knowledge of
something and our preference for something. In other tests we had looked at
the relationship between kinds of associations. So, just freely associating two
different brands and people's preference. And here we find three different
effects. First, there's a positive relationship between positive associations and
preference. So that means that the more positive words and positive
associations people have to particular brand, the more they like it. Probably
not surprising. The other thing is that negative associations have a strong
effect on liking, but in an inverse way. The more you dislike something, the
more negative things comes to your mind. And finally, factual knowledge, so
just knowing that, you know, factual things about a brand, is positively related.
But only slightly, to preference. So this means that what brand managers, for
example, could focus on is to build positive associations, avoid negative
associations. And probably not think too much about factual associations.
Let's go back to the question I asked you at the beginning of this video. I
showed you a number of objects and I asked you to remember those. Now, tell
me how many objects you can remember. Now, let's have a look at the picture
again. And you can count how many you got. Now that you have done this
memory test please fill out the survey just below this video. Here we ask you to
record how many correct answers you had for the first test and for this final
test. Let's look at two different studies that are related to consumer memory. In
one study by Sam McClure and his colleagues. As I promised in the
introduction, we want to focus on the effects of memory on driving consumer
preference. In this study, Sam McCloy and his colleagues focused on the Pepsi
versus Cola challenge as it's called. Here, during a blind test, people don't
really tell the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola. But if they believe
that they are tasting Coca-Cola, they tend to prefer that much more than Pepsi
Cola. Sam McCloy and his colleagues wanted to test the brain basis of that
effect. And while people were scanned using FMRI they were tasting first of all
in blind tasting different kinds of cola. And the more people preferred the cola
the stronger activation the researchers found in the ventral medial prefrontal
cortex. This is a known region for subjective pleasure experiences. On the
other side when the researchers presented the brand of the Cola before people
tasted it. They saw a strong activation of the hippocampus and the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex. But they only found that for Coca-Cola. They never found any
similar brain activation for Pepsi-Cola. So this study shows us that memory
plays a substantial effect on our preferences. And especially how brands can
imbue value to our consumer experiences. In a second study performed here at
the Copenhagen Business School. We looked at the effect of price, country of
origin, and nationality on preference for wine. In this study, participants were
tasting small chunks of wine. And before that they were given country of origin
of the wine, price of the wine. And we also tested people of different
nationalities. Unbeknownst to people they were given all the same wine every
single time. So that means that the differences in preferences for the wine
could only be attributed to the effects of price and country of origin and their
own nationality. If we look at the figure that we are showing on the screen now
you can see that we found at least three different effects. First, we saw an
effective price. If people believed that the wine was expensive, they tended to
rate it higher. Second, if people believed that the wine came from France, they
tended to rate it much higher than if they believed that it was a Mexican wine.
And finally we saw what we call an, a three-way interaction effect. And this was
an interaction between price, country of origin and people's nationality. If we
look at the figure again and look at the arrows, here we have highlighted the
effect of price on French wine. People that came from France had a much
higher effect of price on French wine than people from Italy or other countries.
So this suggests that people from France thought that expensive French wine
tasted much better than cheap French wine. So this study shows us that
different effects, such as price, country of origin, and people's background can
play in on people's preferences for products. So let's have a look at what we've
gone through this time. As we have seen, there are many kinds of memory.
And all those memories should be explored when we are studying consumer
behaviour. We have seen that framing depends on memory. And certain
structures such as the hippocampus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We
have seen that consumers have many kinds of memories associated with
brands and products. Such as procedural, episodic, and semantic memories.
And we also looked at associative density as an index of brand equity. So that
ranks up this session about learning in memory. And next time, we will look at
neuroethics and consumer aberrations.