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RSVP Mountain Dew Task

By omnibrain on January 15, 2007.

I always find it interesting when advertisers use basic psychological research to sell their products - In this case Mountain Dew uses an RSVP task.

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is a technique in psychology (it's also being used for more practical things like displaying text on small displays) used to study a number of topics like attentional blink, temporal masking and repetition blindness. This ad doesn't quite fit into that mold since you don't know what the target is before hand, but the basic idea is there - show a bunch of pictures (or words) in rapid succession and your ability to process information from any individual one is seriously impacted.

So now - watch the video and try to remember as much about it as you can.

Go below the fold for the test question.

How much did the dumbbells weigh?






p.s. mountain dew... the invoice for advertising on Omni Brain is in the mail. Or you can go ahead and send us some free products.
Tags
Psychology
Video

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For those of you who are curious, the video is from oldeenglish.org, they're an improv/sketch group that I really like, and I think some of you might like them too. Like a low budget version of The State.

The full-length version of that video is pretty good too.