Contingent Processes of Source Identification
Effective communication requires that consumers attribute the message content to its intended source. The proposed framework distinguishes four types of source identification processes-cued retrieval, memory-trace refreshment, schematic inferencing, and pure guessing-and delineates their contingencies. Two experiments examine portions of the framework, and experiment 2 introduces a new methodology for decomposing multiple processes. Findings suggest that when cued retrieval fails, consumers try to refresh the original memory trace for the learning episode-a process that is effortful.