Does product familiarity improve shoppers' ability to learn new product information? We examine an earlier study which indicated that greater familiarity increased learning during a new purchase decision. Our reanalysis confirms that the effect depends strongly upon decision strategy. Familiarity facilitates learning when consumers rate each alternative, but when consumers are instructed to choose one alternative, an "inverted u" relationship between familiarity and learning results. Our new analyses also show that consumers familiar with the product category demonstrate stronger brand organization for the new information.D uring the last decade it has become increasingly clear that a decision maker's current knowledge of a topic affects the processing of new, topic-related information. In consumer behavior, knowledge of a product class-or product familiarity-has been a feature of both traditional (Hansen 1972;Howard 1977; Howard and Sheth 1969) and more recent information processing theories of consumer choice (Bettman 1979). Similarly, the impact of knowledge of a problem domain-or expertise-has been explored in many cognitive and social domains (see Chi, Glaser, and Rees 1981 for a review of the former, and Ostrom, Pryor, and Simpson 1981;Fiske, Kinder, and Larter 1983 for examples of the latter). Familiarity has been the focus of recent empirical work in consumer research that examines information acquisition (Bettman and Park 1980b), reactions to advertising (Anderson and Jolson 1980;Edell and Mitchell 1978;Marks and Olson 1981), and the choice of decision rules by consumers (Park 1976). The current paper has two goals: ~ To clarify the mechanisms underlying familiarity effects in consumer choice. ~ To demonstrate the impact of familiarity upon consumers' ability to search-and subsequently to learn-new information.In a previous paper (Johnson and Russo 1981) we examined two plausible but conflicting hypotheses describing the relationship between learning and information acquisition. The first, which we term the "enrichment" hypothesis, suggests that existing knowledge facilitates the learning of new information. A classic example is provided by the chess research of Chase and Simon (1973). In their study, both chess masters and novices viewed actual chess positions for five seconds. The chess masters' ability to recall these positions was superior to the novices' recall. With random patterns of chess pieces, however, the masters' recall was no better than that of the novices. Thus prior knowledge of the domain facilitated leaming-a "rich get richer" relationship which would generate data similar to the exponential curve in Figure A.The second hypothesis suggests that prior knowledge has an "inverted u" effect, as shown in Figure A. Here, in contrast with the enrichment hypothesis, highly familiar consumers may search less than those who are moderately familiar. Bettman and Park (1980a) found such a pattern in consumers' acquisition of information about microwave ovens, and Miyake and Norman (1979) found tha...

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Based on eye-fixation patterns, strategies for multiattribute binary choice were classified as holistic (within an alternative) or dimensional (within an attribute across alternatives). In a task environment hospitable to both strategies, dimensional processing predominated. Even for alternatives like simple gambles, which require holistic computations, dimensional strategies were used as often as holistic ones. The dimensional strategies were augmented by two procedures that simplify the computations. These simplification procedures reduce cognitive effort at the cost of a relatively small increase in errors. However, for about half the subjects the use of these simplification procedures led to systematic violations of expected utility theory on certain choices. Both the preference for dimensional over holistic strategies and the adoption of simplifying procedures are compatible with the desire to reduce cognitive effort. We propose that strategies are selected to minimize the joint cost of errors and effort.

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