When we are children, we must learn many things, including how to become a consumer. A large and growing body of literature has found that children gradually learn many of the skills necessary to be a consumer as they age. These skills include learning how to identify which price promotions are the best deal (such as buy one get one free or 60% off), understanding how advertising works, and what brands symbolize in the culture in which they live. A large and growing body of research conducted in the fields of marketing, psychology, communication, nutrition, and public health have contributed greatly to our understanding of how children progress from a "blank slate" as infants to having an increasingly sophisticated understanding of marketing techniques as they approach adulthood. However, we still know surprisingly little about how our experiences with the marketplace when we are children might affect us years or even decades later in adulthood. Most of what we know is based on research conducted within the last decade, and much remains to be learned.

In the research I have worked on with Merrie Brucks and Jesper Nielsen at the University of Arizona, we investigate whether exposure to advertising in childhood has effects that persist into adulthood. Previous research strongly supports the idea that children first begin to understand that ads are distinct from the content they are embedded within, then begin to understand that the purpose of advertising is to persuade, and finally effectively use the knowledge they have gained about marketing techniques to evaluate marketing activities more critically. However, what happens when we are exposed to ads before we have learned that the purpose of advertising is to persuade (versus to entertain or inform) or before we have learned how to use our marketplace knowledge effectively?

We find that exposure to advertising in childhood indeed has effects that last well beyond the time of initial exposure. That is, when we are exposed to ads before we have begun to process ads similar to the way adults do (in our early teens), we have a greater tendency to develop strong emotional connections to elements featured in the advertising, such as brand characters. This emotional connection then causes us to evaluate the products associated with the advertising less critically. For example, we might think that a sugary or fattening snack is healthier than we would otherwise judge it to be. These biases are also quite resilient. Even after using well-known techniques for getting people to recognize and correct for judgment biases, people who harbored strongly positive feelings toward advertising elements such as brand characters resisted changing their judgments of these products. We even found the biases can translate to new products that do not even exist yet when they feature the same advertising elements. For example, a well-known brand character for a breakfast cereal could be used to promote a different food product and biased product evaluations can transfer to the new product.

Part 2

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was the foremost proponent of the idea that children pass through distinct stages of cognitive development. According to Dr. Connell's research this may not be the case. Which position do developmental specialists currently support? Fixed stages of cognitive development or differing stages in information-processing capabilities? Support your answer.