In both cases obvious practical motives are decisive. The
cover page comes into the field of vision more frequently. What is
surrounded by reading matter is less easily overlooked.
But the newspaper world hardly realizes how much other variations of
position influence the psychological effect. Starch[51] made
experiments in which he did not use real advertisements, but
meaningless syllables so as to exclude the influence of familiarity
with any announcement. He arranged little booklets, each of 12 pages,
on which a syllable such as _lod_, _zan_, _mep_, _dut_, _yib_, and so
on was printed in the middle of each page. Each of his 50 subjects
glanced over the book and then wrote down what syllables remained in
memory. He found that the syllables which stood on the first and last
page were remembered by 34 persons, those on the second and eleventh
by about 26, and those on the eight other pages by an average of 17
persons. In the next experiment he printed one syllable in the middle
of the upper and one in the middle of the lower half of each page. The
results now showed that of those syllables which were remembered 54
per cent stood on the upper half and 46 per cent on the lower half of
the page. Finally, he divided every page into four parts and printed
one syllable on the middle of each fourth of a page. The results
showed that of the remembered syllables 28 per cent stood on the
left-hand upper fourth, 33 per cent on the right-hand upper fourth, 16
per cent left-hand lower, and 23 per cent right-hand lower.
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