Using Eye Tracking to Study the “Humor Effect”
What was the last hilarious situation you found yourself in? Aside from the funny bit, can you remember much else about it?
According to a good amount of memory research, chances that you remember the smaller, non-humorous details are less likely. Humans in general are quite good at recalling unusual or unexpected events, and a perfect example of an unusual or unexpected even is when something funny takes place. But enhanced memory for humor often results in a decrease in your ability to remember unrelated nonhumorous information that was encountered at the same time.
As a recent study published in the Journal of General Psychology predicts, if one of your colleagues turned up to a serious business meeting dressed as Mickey Mouse, it’s likely you’d remember the funny incident a month later, but chances are you would forget about what your other colleagues were wearing, what you had for lunch that day, and perhaps even what important information was presented at the meeting.
In memory research, this phenomenon – an enhanced memory for humor at the expense of memory for nonhumor – has become known as the “humor effect.” The physiological explanation behind this effect is quite interesting, and is based on processes at both the memory encoding and memory retrieval stages, which may account for the suppressed memory for unrelated nonhumorous information.
Researchers say that humorous information in your brain is distinctively “marked,” lending it an advantage at retrieval. This may explain why humor impairs the free recall of nonhumorous information. According to the article, “free recall tasks usually refer explicitly to the learning context,” so when a person intentionally thinks back to the funny moment, they are able to reexperience the humor that was perceived at the moment of learning, the moment it happened. Researchers believe that it’s this reexperience that may interfere with the retrieval of the other, nonhumorous details from the experience.
And this is where eye tracking comes into play.
In an effort to assess the impact of humor on human attention and experience, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in Holland used eye tracking technology, monitoring study participants’ visual attention to a selection of humorous texts, nonhumorous, neutral and texts, and nonhumorous texts that were equally positive as the humorous ones.
Fifty-eight students were seated behind an eye tracker and shown the various texts, with the researchers assuming that, consistent to the “humor effect”, they would pay more attention to the funny texts.
As it turns out, their assumptions were correct, and participants showed that humor already receives enhanced attention at encoding. They also found that humor
“not only impairs the free recall of context information but also affects cued memory processes such as recognition.” This finding in particular is interesting for the idea that through the use of humor in applied settings, such as identifying advertised brands in a supermarket, people are more likely to remember the humor, and also more likely to forget nonhumorous things surrounding the humorous ones.
It seems that humor, then, is a win-win situation for advertisers as well as consumers.
Humor in the Eye Tracker: Attention Capture and Distraction from Context Cues
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