Processing visual metaphors in advertising: an exploratory study of cognitive abilities

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the role of visual working memory capacity for visual metaphor processing in advertising. First, participants were successively shown 82 visual metaphors and were asked to indicate whether they were a fusion or a replacement while performing a visual structure decision task. Second, in a verbalisation task, participants were invited to orally interpret the same 82 visual metaphors. Verbalisations were analyzed through three semiotic dimensions: expression, conceptualisation, and communication. Results showed that in the first task, metaphor type had a limited effect, while the difference in visual working memory capacity was close to significance. In the second task, fusions elicited more verbalisations in the expression dimension and had faster verbalisation times than replacements. Furthermore, verbalisation times were faster for high visual working memory participants. These findings are discussed in relation to the visual metaphor literature, and research perspectives are provided to empirically explore visual metaphor processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual metaphor
• visual working memory
• semiotic dimensions
• fusions
• replacements

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge all members of the research team CHArt-UPEC along with Dr Aline Frey and Dr Elisabetta Zibetti for their advice on the manuscript. We also thank Dr Samuel Demarchi for proofreading the manuscript as well as Dr Nicolas Rochat and Dr Hugues Delmas for their useful comments. The authors also kindly acknowledge Prof. Daniel Devatman Hromada for programming the original code of the JavaScript software, L’atelier de Tisab for drawing the visual metaphors shown in the appendices and giving us written permission to display them, Prof. Kevin Wise and Dr Mathew Peterson for sharing their research article, and Dr Victoria Grace for her editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study along with information related to the software used for this experiment are openly available in Open science framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/5wq9p/?view_only=aff2a2f4a8df4266bd55680ee4e07cd9

Notes

1 Due to copyright issues, images are deliberately unavailable