Journal of Business and Psychology, Vol. 17, No.

3, Spring 2003 (2003)

A RESEARCH TOOL TO INCREASE ATTENTION TO EXPERIMENTAL MATERIALS: MANIPULATING PRESENTATION FORMAT Elizabeth Dreike Almer
Portland State University

Jill R. Hopper
Middle Tennessee State University

Steven E. Kaplan
Arizona State University

ABSTRACT: Experimental approaches require researchers in a variety of applied business disciplines to design experimental materials. This research is often busy and difficult to secure high-level professionals; thus, researchers must ensure sufficient attention to experimental materials to provide usable data. The current study suggests an experimental design feature to encourage participants to thoroughly process information contained in experimental materials. Based on Reynolds (1992) selective attention strategy (SAS) model, variations in presentation format were expected to influence the relative salience of information presented. Two aspects of presentation format were manipulated to increase salience: display (paragraph vs. bullet point) and typeface (standard vs. bold underlined). Results indicate display improved ability to retrieve information, but typeface did not. Implications for the design of experimental materials are discussed. KEY WORDS: experimental materials; research design, information format.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Jordan Lowe, David Williams, and Samantha Chan. Address correspondence to Professor Elizabeth Almer, School of Business Administration, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751; elizabetha@sba. pdx.edu. 405
0889-3268/03/0300-0405/0 2003 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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Across a wide variety of business disciplines, behavioral research is conducted using experimental materials and subjects who are business professionals. One of the most difficult and necessary design aspects of this research is to ensure that participants sufficiently attend to the experimental materials. These participants, who may be reluctant volunteers, are often high-level professionals such as corporate executives, board members or CPAs. As researchers, we compete for participants scarce and valuable time and must consider how studies can be designed to get participants full attention, or at minimum, sufficient attention to test the research questions of interest. If participants dont attend to important dimensions of experimental materials, there has been a lack of inclusion importance (Yates, 1990, p. 376), which precludes getting a response to that dimension we are interested in studying (Tan and Yates, 1995). The practical implication for researchers is that we must eliminate these participants from subsequent analyses because they have not passed the basic manipulation checks. This then requires researchers to either go through the difficult and costly process of securing more of these high level participants, or to accept the reduced statistical power resulting from a smaller sample. Traditionally, researchers have relied on several methods to gain participant attention to experimental materials: altruistic motives of participants, incentives or accountability. Given the positions of many of these participants, hoping they want to advance science through their participation may not be the most reliable means to ensure attention to experimental materials. Incentives too are problematic. Incentives that are sufficient to increase attention for experienced professionals are likely to be quite high and thus, are often cost prohibitive. Finally, a strong accountability manipulation precludes participant confidentiality or alternatively, may interject controversial deceptive methods into a study (Dopuch, 1992). For example, the complexity of holding professional respondents accountable for a task has led some researchers to deceive participants by only promising accountability, but then not following through (Lord, 1992). While careful use of deception may be fairly accepted in psychology research (Adair et al., 1985), in other professional fields such as accounting (Gibbins, 1992) and marketing (Kimmel, 2001), it is much more controversial. For these reasons, a significant portion of experimental applied business research does not include explicit means of elevating the level of participants motivation. Thus, researchers are left with a perplexing dilemma: How to enhance participant attention to experimental materials without relying on participants to be self-motivated or incurring the difficulties brought about by accountability and incentives. In an effort to address this problem and to aid researchers, the cur-

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rent study investigates an experimental design feature that can potentially improve participant attention when neither accountability nor incentives will be used in the study. Following prior research which has found that effort-minimizing individuals are likely to use more salient information (Payne, Bettman and Johnson, 1993; MacGregor and Slovic, 1986), this study examines whether variations in the presentation format of information will increase the salience of that information, thus leading to increased attention by participants. Experimental researchers make a variety of choices in designing and conducting research. One of the important choices made is the presentation format for key information such as background data or information about independent variables. Historically, researchers have treated presentation format as an item to be controlled. This control has been achieved by simply presenting information in a similar manner to all participants. While it may remove presentation format as an explanation for results, this approach does not necessarily foster vigilant processing of information by participants. The current study extends previous research by focusing on presentation format as a research tool for experimental design. It is important to examine subtle variations in presentation format because these features are controllable by the researcher, their use is relatively transparent in the study, and yet may influence the extent to which participants attend to the experimental materials. The current study presents exactly the same set of information to participants, but manipulates two aspects of presentation format: display and typeface. Under display, information is presented in either paragraph form or in bullet point form. Under typeface, information is presented in either standard form or in a bold and underlined form. Information presented in a bullet point form or in a bold and underlined form is expected to be more salient, and thus, receive greater attention and be more readily retrievable. The set of financially related information in this study was manipulated in a between subjects design and was presented as part of an overall auditing case involving assessing the financial ability of a company to sustain operations for another year (i.e., going concern status an audit client). Results support the expectation that information displayed in a bullet point format resulted in better subsequent retrieval of information than paragraph display of information. However, contrary to expectations, manipulating the typeface of information did not appear to affect retrieval of information. This finding has significant implications for applied business researchers since it suggests that altering the presentation format of information in experiments can be a viable and virtually costless means of increasing the amount of attention accorded by participants to experimental materials.

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SALIENCE, ATTENTION, AND PRESENTATION FORMAT The concept of salience is quite basic, defined by Webster as the property of standing out. Fiske and Taylor (1991, p. 246) elaborate on this definition somewhat, characterizing salience as the extent to which particular stimuli stand out relative to others in their environment. They also contend that there are multiple sources of salience. Of particular interest to the current study is the role of figural emphasis as a source of salience. Individuals have been found to spontaneously divide their perceptual field into figure and ground (Kahneman, 1973) with the portion that stands out in perception being considered the figure whereas other elements in the field represent the ground. Research in various areas of psychology has demonstrated that the figural stimuli are interpreted as being more salient (Kahneman, 1973; McArthur and Post, 1977) and that the level of attention directed to the figural stimuli is a function of the contrast between figure and ground (McArthur and Post, 1977). Attention to information represents one of the crucial first steps in information processing (Fiske and Taylor, 1991) and is part of the process by which external stimuli are transformed into internal representations. Thus, it provides the foundation for subsequent cognitive activities such as learning and decision-making. The literature on text learning is directly related to the manner in which presentation format is expected to impact attention and retrieval in the current study. Reynolds (1992) reviews and evaluates theoretical and empirical research on text learning based upon his selective attention strategy (SAS) model of learning. The SAS model posits a linear, causal relationship between text salience and attention as well as between attention and subsequent learning. This model indicates that salience is critical to the initial stage of the learning process as information that is more salient receives more attention and is, therefore, more readily learned. The current study examines the role of salience in an audit judgment context. All participants were provided with exactly the same set of financially related client information. However, while the information presented was the same, display and typeface were manipulated as a mechanism to alter information salience. These two presentation format variables are used to vary the extent to which the financially related client information will appear figural and thus, require less cognitive effort and be more easily processed. The first presentation format variable is display. Display refers to whether the financially related client information was shown in paragraph form (e.g., as a series of consecutive sentences) or in a series of sentences organized as individual bullet points. While sentence content and order were exactly the same, the bullet point presentation is ex-

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pected to make the sentences appear more isolated from one another, and thus, more figural. The second presentation format variable is typeface. With the typeface manipulation, certain key words were either highlighted through the use of a bold and underlined typeface or presented in standard typeface. Key words that are presented in bold typeface and underlined should appear more prominent, and thus, more figural. With both manipulations, the increased figure/ground contrast is expected to increase salience of and subsequent attention to the information, thus improving acquisition of it. The improved acquisition should in turn, improve the extent to which the information is retrievable from memory. This discussion leads to the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: Retrieval of financially related client information displayed in a bullet point format will be greater than when displayed in a paragraph format. Hypothesis 2: Retrieval of financially related client information presented in a bold and underlined typeface will be greater than when presented in a standard typeface.

METHOD Participants and Task Participants for this study were undergraduate auditing students. Auditing students represented an appropriate group for the study because of the interest in attention and retrieval processes as opposed to judgment and choice. Also, relative to professional auditors, a large number of auditing students was more readily accessible. A total of 247 students from four universities participated in the study and completed responses were obtained from 225 students (107 male and 118 female). All students had covered auditors responsibility for a going concern and the going concern audit report in their class prior to completing the task, thus they were sufficiently familiar with the topic contained in the experimental materials. Participants were instructed that the task involved reading a case in which they needed to assess the going concern status of a hypothetical audit client, EDA Inc. The case materials contained all the relevant pieces of information necessary to make such an assessment: a financially related written description of the client, comparative financial statements, selected ratios and the explanatory language that would be included in a going concern audit report if it was determined to be necessary. Information contained in the case materials was the same for all

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participants, but the presentation format of the financially related information varied between subjects. After reading the case materials, participants were instructed to place them in a provided envelope and remove an enclosed questionnaire. Participants were told to not look back at the case materials as they completed the questionnaire. The case materials and questionnaire were printed on different colors of paper in order to aid instructors monitoring students to ensure they did not look back at the case materials while completing the questionnaire. No students were found to look back at the case after the questionnaire was removed from the envelope. The questionnaire first asked participants to specify the type of audit report they would issue for the client. Participants were then asked specific questions about the nine pieces of financially related information included in the case. Researchers employed both recall and recognition tests in experimental material manipulation checks. Generally, recall is considered the cognitively more challenging task and the ability to recall an item would presumably represent a stronger test of whether an individual attended to an item. Thus, both types of retrieval were used to elicit participant responses in the current study. For approximately half the participants, the questions were in the form of a recognition test, whereas for the remaining participants the questions were in the form of a recall test. These questions served as measures of retrieval to test the hypotheses. After answering retrieval questions, participants also were asked to indicate how many retrieval questions they believed they answered correctly. Lastly, participants completed a debriefing questionnaire in which they were asked to provide demographic information about their gender, age, accounting experience, professional goals and academic standing. Participating auditing students did not receive any course credit for their involvement in the study and they responded anonymously to the questionnaire. They were told, however, to do their best as it was critical to success of the research project. These incentives (or lack thereof) were used because they mimic those commonly used in much experimental applied business research.

Independent Variables Display. The first independent variable was the manner in which the financially related information was displayed in the case (DISPLAY). There were two levels of DISPLAY, paragraph or bullet point, randomly assigned between subjects. In the paragraph format, consecutive sentences in a paragraph provided the nine pieces of financially related information to participants. For the bullet point format, these nine sen-

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tences were presented in the same order, in nine consecutive bullet points. Typeface. The second independent variable is typeface (TYPE). TYPE is the typeface that the specific financially related information was presented in. There were two levels of the variable, standard and bold underlined, randomly assigned between subjects. In the standard format, all financially related information was presented in a standard typeface. In the bold underlined condition, the portion of financially related information that is specifically asked about in the retrieval questions was typed as bold and underlined. Dependent Variable Accuracy of retrieval was measured by the proportion of nine questions answered correctly about financially related information presented in the case. These questions addressed the following items stated in the case: service provided, ownership structure, industry, failure rate, cash flow position, management ability in turning troubled companies around, Pacific Rim contract, level of interest rate and stability of interest rate. The questions were formulated to require either recall or recognition of specific information for each of these items.1 Because results did not differ depending upon the format of the retrieval question, responses were pooled for analysis purposes. In an effort to understand the underlying process by which salience impacts retrieval, a measure of participants self-insight was also elicited. Specifically, after responding to the retrieval questions, participants were asked how many questions they believed were answered correctly. This measure provides some indication of whether the participants were aware of the extent to which they devoted attention to the financially related information.

RESULTS Retrieval In order to evaluate H1 and H2, the effect of information format on retrieval was tested in a 2 2 ANCOVA model. The dependent variable in the analysis was the proportion of financially related information
1 Recall responses were coded independently by two graduate assistants. In all cases, agreement between the graduate assistants was in excess of 90%. After measuring agreement, coding differences were reconciled by one of the authors.

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questions answered correctly.2 The denominator for this proportion was nine since there were nine financially related information questions. Two of the demographic variables were significantly associated with the retrieval, and thus, included in the model: accounting GPA (ACCGPA) and location (LOC) in which the data was collected. The results of the ANCOVA model and descriptive statistics are shown in Table 1. The results shown in Table 1 Panel A indicate that there is a significant main effect for DISPLAY (p < .0001). H1 predicts that more financially related information will be accurately retrieved if it was presented in bullet point format rather than paragraph format. Descriptive statistics by treatment are presented in Table 1 Panel B. As predicted, participants who received the financially related information organized in bullet point format correctly retrieved 7.98 out of 9 items (89%), as compared to only 6.74 items (75%) if the information was presented in paragraph form. However, H2 was not supported since the main effect for TYPE was not significant (p < .6475). Retrieval was not associated with the
Table 1 ANCOVA Accuracy of Retrieval Panel A: ANCOVA Results Source of Variation Covariates ACCGPA LOC Main Effects DISPLAY TYPE DISPLAY*TYPE Error SS Df MS F p-value

34.05 12.20 83.84 .62 2.06 610.09

1 1 1 1 1 220

34.05 12.20 83.84 .62 2.06 2.78

12.22 4.38 30.10 .22 .74

.0006 .0375 .0001 .6380 .3906

Panel B: Adjusted Treatment Means DISPLAY Paragraph (n = 111) Mean (Std. Deviation) 6.74 (1.68) Bullet Point (n = 114) 7.98 (1.68) Plain (n = 111) 7.31 (1.67) TYPE Bold Underline (n = 114) 7.41 (1.67)

2 It could be argued that that because the proportion was based upon a binary response variable, the data should be analyzed as a logistic regression (SAS 1990) or an ANCOVA where the response has been transformed using an arcsine transformation. Data was analyzed using both these methods. However, since the results do not differ qualitatively, for ease of interpretation, the ANCOVA analysis is reported in the paper.

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form of the typeface. In addition, ACCGPA and LOC were both significant (p < .0004 and .0349, respectively). Students reporting higher accounting GPAs correctly retrieved more financially related information. Location controlled for university-related differences such as instructor or student caliber and motivation. Additional Analysis As demonstrated above, the display manipulation was differentially salient. If participants were aware of the level of attention devoted to the information, they should report more questions answered correctly in the bullet-point than paragraph format. On the other hand, since the typeface manipulation did not affect information salience, participants would not be expected to report different numbers of questions answered correctly in the standard versus bold and underlined typeface. To examine whether participants appear to be aware of their level of attention and memory accuracy, a supplemental analysis was conducted. Table 2 presents the results of an ANCOVA model on the number of questions participants believed they answered correctly. As before, the independent variables in the model are DISPLAY, TYPE, ACCGPA, and LOC. The results shown in Table 2 Panel A indicate that there is a signifi-

Table 2 ANCOVA Participant Reported Number of Questions Answered Correctly Panel A: ANCOVA Results Source of Variation Covariates ACCGPA LOC Main Effects DISPLAY TYPE DISPLAY*TYPE Error SS Df MS F p-value

17.79 4.03 120.55 17.80 3.39 450.47

1 1 1 1 1 220

17.79 4.03 120.55 17.80 3.39 2.06

8.65 1.96 58.61 3.21 1.65

.0036 .1630 .0001 .0744 .2009

Panel B: Adjusted Treatment Means DISPLAY Paragraph (n = 111) Mean (Std. Deviation) 6.35 (1.43) Bullet Point (n = 114) 7.84 (1.41) Plain (n = 111) 6.93 (1.46) TYPE Bold Underline (n = 114) 7.27 (1.44)

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cant main effect for DISPLAY (p < .0001). Descriptive statistics by treatment are presented in Table 2 Panel B. The higher number of questions reported to be answered correctly in the bullet point format indicates that participants were aware of having paid more attention to information when it was presented in bullet point format than when it was presented in paragraph format. The difference between the number of questions reported to be answered correctly under the standard versus bold underlined typeface was marginally significant (p < .0744). As shown in Table 2 Panel B, the number of questions participants reported answering correctly was greater under the bold underlined typeface. Thus, even though the plain typeface did not influence actual retrieval it was marginally associated with a weak perception of accuracy.

DISCUSSION Consistent with the effort-accuracy paradigm that has received substantial support within psychology (Payne et al., 1993), the premise for the current study is that individuals tend to be effort minimizing when participating in experimental sessions. Researchers in applied business settings have attempted to mitigate this tendency by utilizing incentives or accountability in experiments, often at substantial cost (Boatsman, Moeckel, and Pei, 1997). However, researchers are commonly unable to incorporate either of these features into their experimental research. The absence of these features raises concerns that participants will not attend to the experimental materials. This failure to attend to important dimensions of the experimental materials leads to a lack of inclusion importance (Yates, 1990; Tan and Yates, 1995). From a practical standpoint, these participants do not pass the manipulation checks and are then eliminated from subsequent analyses. The aim of the current study was to examine the relatively subtle factor of presentation as a means to improve participant attention. This study examined the role of information salience on directing participants effort and attention to certain financially related informational items in the hypothetical case. It was expected that variations in presentation format would impact the figure/ground contrast of these items, thus increasing their salience and the attention they are accorded. Because we were not certain on how to best manipulate the figure/ground contrast, the current study involved two different manipulations. One manipulation involved display while the other involved typeface. Each of these manipulations was intended to make key information item stand out to the reader and draw attention to the item. Turning to the results, the study found that display had a significant impact on participants ability to retrieve information. Specifically, indi-

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viduals whose case materials presented the financially related information in bullet point format were better able to retrieve more of that information than individuals who received that information in paragraph format. Thus, the results from our study offer support for hypothesis one. However, contrary to our hypothesis two, typeface (i.e., whether key words or phrases were bold and underlined) did not affect the participants ability to retrieve information. Our results indicate that simply highlighting specific information in bold and underlined typeface is not likely to increase subjects ability to subsequently retrieve that information. In considering our pattern of results, it is important to note that our purpose was not to test the theory on the relationship between figure and ground. Prior research has established that individuals tend to attend to items that stand out (Kahneman, 1973; McArthur and Post, 1977). Instead, our purpose was to apply this theory by identifying specific forms of presentation form that represent sufficient means to allow certain key items to stand out and thus, enhance attention. Our findings suggest that the display manipulation provides a sufficient means for financial items to stand out whereas the typeface manipulations did not. The findings from this study have several implications for researchers who design and use experimental materials. Well-designed materials are critical not only to ensure experimental control, but also to ensure that adequate attention is expended on the part of participants to facilitate testing specific theories. It is plausible that in testing certain theories, insignificant findings could be found not because of shortcomings in the theory, but because of a lack of attention by participants. This study demonstrates that when designing experiments, it is possible to improve participant attention without the complications that arise from the accountability or incentive features previously used by applied business researchers. As evidenced by our lack of findings for typeface, not all forms of salience enhancements will translate into differential attention and encoding. The current results on bullet point versus paragraph display demonstrate that specific formats of information presentation can increase retrieval accuracy. The results should be particularly useful to others planning on conducting an experimental study in the often encountered situation where participants incentives and/or their accountability will be low. However, two potential cautions related to this study should be noted. First, the use of salience enhancing presentations may raise a question about demand effects. The potential exists that highlighting information may represent a signal that leads participants to discern the studys underlying hypothesis, and respond in a manner to make the hypothesis true. In considering this potential, several points should be noted. Concerns over demand effects, typically are raised for studies em-

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ploying repeated measures (Harsha and Knapp, 1990). In a repeated measures design, participants are able to observe multiple levels of a manipulated variable, which provides a direct signal to participants about the focus of the study. Even when certain information is made more salient, as long as the variable is between subjects participants will only be exposed to one level of the variable. Further, if this is a concern, enhancing the salience of several pieces of information could reduce this potential. A second caution of manipulating presentation format may involve a trade-off with external validity. That is, while a bullet point display appears to represent the most salient form of information presentation, it is possible that this form would not typically be used to present certain kinds of information in the real world. Thus, for researchers choosing to increase attention through presentation format rather than through potentially problematic incentives or accountability, appropriate design of experimental materials must be carefully considered in order to avoid unnecessary noise in a study. The analysis of participants reported number of questions answered correctly offers some preliminary evidence as to whether participants are aware of the level of attention accorded to information. Consistent with the retrieval results, the number of questions participants reported answering correctly was greater under a bullet point display than a paragraph display. Surprisingly, typeface marginally influenced the number of questions participants reported answering correctly, even though it had no influence on actual accuracy. While participant awareness may not have a direct impact on experimental design, it is of interest to researchers attempting to increase information salience, and thereby, participant attention. The current study represents an initial study into the role of information presentation as a means of increasing participant attention to experimental materials and ensuring inclusion importance (Yates, 1990). It suggests that applied business researchers can improve attention to experimental materials even when the study does not use either incentives or accountability. An important consequence for researchers is that such techniques may lead to the loss of fewer valuable participants due to manipulation check failures. However, this study does not test the relative effectiveness of presentation format, accountability and incentives. A worthwhile endeavor would be to make this explicit comparison between these attention-increasing techniques. Another potential area for future research is to examine the impact of presentation format on retrieval for longer and more complex information sets. Participants in the current study were presented with only nine pieces of information that were a relatively short and simple infor-

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mation set. Further, none of the pieces of information in the current case was inconsistent with a troubled client. The use of both consistent and inconsistent information would represent one approach to creating a more complex information set. Notable in this regard, the current studys focus on a relatively short information set actually worked against finding statistically significant differences between treatment levels. Thus, it is possible that the effects of typeface could be significant for a longer or more complex information set. The role of differential salience in presentation formats for such information sets represents an area for further research. In closing, it is worth reiterating that participants in the current study were provided with no monetary or other incentives and were not explicitly held accountable for their responses. This setting is typical of the setting commonly used in experimental studies in business where the incentives and pressures of real life environments are absent. Thus, results should be particularly useful to others planning on conducting an experimental study where participants incentives will be low. It is, however, unclear from the current study whether the effects found for display will generalize to an environment where participants face greater incentives or accountability.

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