3 Listen Activity 2
Activity #L2: Selective Attention, Icon Test
When my niece was about 2 years old, we were driving down a commercial district in town. From her car seat, she pointed out the window toward a McDonald’s sign and said – “I’m loving it.” Without the ability to read and really know the intentions of this iconic food brand, she was drawn to SELECT the hamburger chain out from a crowd of signs and billboards. Marketing tactics are designed to build a relationship between product and consumer. With success, these tactics lead to brand familiarity that is hard to unlearn.
Do you have strong consumer relationships with brands? See if you can pair these brand slogans with their iconic company:
Activity #L2.1:
Remember, the key to selective attention; at any given moment, our attention can be highly focused. Pretend you are scrolling through cable TV channels. All you keep seeing are ads. This is annoying, but my guess is that you can, even with a fairly fast pace of channel surfing, select the brand being advertised. Try it out:
Check out these popular brand icons in the activity below:
Watch the video then try the activity below to see what you can recall from the images you saw. Try not to refer to the video when completing the activity.
Icons are an extremely important part of remembering. We all benefit from using imagery to learn new information. Your keen ability to select the brand name/icon association demonstrates our unique relationship with images. In fact, research has found that the average person can recognize between 85-90% of images that they have seen before.
Just like “McDonalds” spending millions of dollars to gain your business through advertisements and brand loyalty, you need to be able to dedicate that same level of selective attention (not money 😃) to what you are learning. My students often tell me they can remember the picture on the page the information is located on in their textbook but still have trouble remembering the important information. In a later lesson, we will talk about how pairing images with new knowledge can enhance memory.
