The authors proposed that item selection during shopping is based on brand
name recognition rather than recall. College students rated advertisements
and news stories of a simulated radio program for level of amusement (orien
ting activity) before participating in a surprise recognition test. Humor l
evel of the advertisements was varied systematically, and content was contr
olled. According to signal detection analysis, humor did not affect the str
ength of recognition memory for brand names (nonsense units). However, bran
d names and product types were significantly more likely to be associated w
hen appearing in humorous advertisements than in nonhumorous advertisements
. The results humor and recall.