Abstract:

The purpose of our study was to observe the effects of distracting advertisements on participants’ ability to absorb information, as measured by an online reading comprehension test. Our sample included 49 undergraduate students from the University of North Texas, all of whom were enrolled in the Experimental Methods lab and were recruited from three different lab sections based on class attendance. We instructed all participants to read an online article with varying levels of advertisements and answer a series of questions designed to test their comprehension.

We believed that exposing participants to higher levels of distraction would result in lower comprehension scores and would take participants longer to complete the test. We did not find significant results, and the difference between the high, low and no distraction groups was not statistically significant.

Our findings could be useful for future web design and advertisements. It would be of particular interest to advertising agencies who want to advertise on prominent sites, or for companies that want to increase ad revenue but are concerned that their content would be impacted in the process. However, our study did have limitations that ought to be taken into account, such as a fatigue effects because our participants had been exposed to multiple test before our study.