This research examines how differences in the organization of brand information in memory between higher and lower knowledge consumers affects which brands are retrieved when consumers are provided with a usage situation. A spreading activation network model of memory is used to predict the results of an experiment where the usage situations were varied at encoding and repeated recall sessions. The results of the study indicate that lower knowledge consumers tend to learn only the brand information that is appropriate for a usage situation at encoding and do not organize brands by subcategory in memory. Consequently, lower knowledge consumers tend. | The Moderating Effect of Product Knowledge on the Learning and Organization o. Elizabeth Cowley Andrew A Mitchell Journal of Consumer Research Dec 2003 30 3 ABI INFORM Global pg. 443 The Moderating Effect of Product Knowledge on the Learning and Organization of Product Information ELIZABETH COWLEY ANDREW A. MITCHELL This research examines how differences in the organization of brand information in memory between higher and lower knowledge consumers affects which brands are retrieved when consumers are provided with a usage situation. A spreading activation network model of memory is used to predict the results of an experiment where the usage situations were varied at encoding and repeated recall sessions. The results of the study indicate that lower knowledge consumers tend to learn only the brand information that is appropriate for a usage situation at encoding and do not organize brands by subcategory in memory. Consequently lower knowledge consumers tend to retrieve the same set of brands regardless of the usage situation at retrieval. Alternatively higher knowledge consumers learn brand information appropriate for different usage situations and organize this information by product subcategories. This allows higher knowledge consumers to retrieve the brands appropriate for the usage situation at retrieval and to vary the set of retrieved brands as the usage situation changes. Understanding how consumers organize information about brands from a product category in memory has become an important topic in consumer behavior . Hutchinson Raman and Mantrala 1994 Nedungadi Chat-topadhyay and Muthukrishnan 2001 . One reason for this interest is that it has been frequently demonstrated that how information is organized in memory affects both how much information and what information is retrieved by consumers . Hutchinson et al. 1994 Nedungadi 1990 Wyer and Srull 1989 . In consumer behavior the relationship between the organization of information in memory and .
