Diegetic and non-diegetic surprises, and their effect on liking, long-term recall and comprehension in narrative television commercials

Abstract

The aim of this experiment is to classify surprises in audiovisual narratives, and to measure the efficacy of surprise in audiovisual stories in terms of liking, long-term recall and comprehension in television commercials. The theoretical analysis leads to distinguish 3 types of audiovisual narrative surprises: non-diegetic, diegetic implausible and diegetic plausible. In order to test these types of surprises with complete and homogeneous stories in terms of duration, and to show many of these types of surprises to each participant, 16 narrative television commercials (M=40,68 seconds) were used as stimuli in this study. The experimental design was a 4 groups (3 groups of surprise, and 1 non-surprise group, 4 stories each) fully randomised experiment (N=120, Age: 18-24). The results showed that surprise had a significant enhancing effect on liking, on the day of the viewing (c² (3,N=480)=5.83, p=0.12), and one month after (c² (3,N=480)=10.38, p=.016); an ANOVA test showed a significant relation between surprise and the degree of comprehension (F(1,480)=12.14), p