Expectation-driven and experience-driven attention interactively influence product searching: the moderating role of working memory capacity

Consumers selectively focus their attention on the target and ignore irrelevant information according to their expectations when searching for products. For instance, consumers search for target flavor packages that are incongruent (vs. congruent) with their color expectations formed based on long-term experience more slowly and inaccurately, which is also known as the color-flavor incongruency effect. However, the effect of conflicting information on task performance varies with the frequency of conflict, and there are both expectation-driven and experience-driven mechanisms underlying the adjustment of attention in different task contexts. In addition, individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) moderate the expectation-driven attentional control strategy. Here, we report three experiments designed to examine whether the presence or absence of precues of different proportion congruence (i.e., mostly congruent or mostly incongruent; MC or MI) can alter participants’ product search performance based on color expectations and whether individual WMC differences moderate this effect. Experiment 1 found that the magnitude of the color-flavor incongruency effect was interactively influenced by expectation- and experience-driven attentional control strategies. For MC blocks, this effect was larger in the cued (vs. uncued) condition. In contrast, for MI blocks, there was no difference in the size of the color-flavor incongruency effect in the two conditions. Experiment 2 extended the interactive effect of the two attentional control strategies on the product search based on expectation to a real shopping scenario simulated by using virtual reality technology. Experiment 3 further discovered that the size of the color-flavor incongruency effect decreased with increasing WMC in the MI-cued condition where the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 1500 ms. These findings provide empirical evidence that changes in the frequency of violated-expectation stimuli can affect the adjustment of consumers’ attention when conducting product searches and shed light on how consumers can switch color expectations to quickly search for target products based on the precues of proportion congruence.