Acceso usuarios
, Vanesa Apaolaza Ibáñez, Patxi Alija
Environmental psychology postulates that interacting with nature has inherently positive emotional, cognitive and physiological effects. Based on Attention Restoration Theory and related research, this paper presents a theoretical framework hypothesising that nature imagery presented in an advertisement enhances cognitive advertising message elaboration and memory. Three experimental studies, including an eye-tracking experiment, which successively addressed emotional, information processing and memory effects of exposure to nature imagery in advertising, provided evidence supporting postulated effects. Findings confirmed the hypothesis that advertisements featuring visual representations of pleasant nature scenes can evoke very similar emotional responses to those experienced in pleasant natural environments, which constitutes a necessary condition for the suggested cognitive effects. As hypothesised, advertising messages of advertisements featuring pleasant nature imagery achieved higher memory scores in both unaided recall and recognition compared to identical advertisements displaying a variety of other attractive pictures.
