Cognitive Processing of Visual Metaphors in Advertising: an Exploratory Study with Eye-tracking

Abstract

Researchers who have tried to enumerate the formal structures of visual metaphors in pictorial advertising distinguish three basic types: two or more aligned objects, two objects combined in one, and one object absent but suggested by the context. Several studies have tried to establish if each visual structure implies a different degree of cognitive elaboration since it can have pragmatic implications but a complete answer has not yet been reached. This exploratory experiment aims to compare the differences in complexity of the three types of visual advertising metaphors using the eye behaviour as a measure of the cognitive effort. Seventeen participants took part in this eye-tracking study ant twenty car print ads were used as stimuli. The data indicate that the structure named replacement, in which one object absent but suggested by the context, needed more viewing time and presented more fixations. Therefore, this structure seems to be more complex, accordingly to other empirical studies.