Department of Education, Universidad Nebrija, 28015, Madrid, Spain.
Department of Methodology and ERI-Lectura, Universitat de València, 46010, Valencia, Spain.
Sci Rep. 2023 Oct 19;13(1):17817. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-45213-0.
Brand names are valuable company assets often accompanied by a unique graphical composition (i.e., as logotypes). Recent research has demonstrated that this uniqueness makes brand names and logotypes susceptible to counterfeiting through misspelling by transposition in tasks that require participants to identify correct spellings. However, our understanding of how brand names are incidentally processed when presented as logotypes is incomplete. To address this gap in knowledge, we conducted a virtual reality experiment to explore the transposed-letter confusability effect on brand name recognition. Participants were immersed in a virtual reality setting and incidentally exposed to logotypes that had correctly spelled brand names or included letter transpositions. Offline analyses revealed that participants were more accurate at recognizing brand names that had been presented with correct spellings than those that had been misspelled. Furthermore, participants exhibited false memories for misspelled logotypes, recalling them as if they had been spelled correctly. Thus, our findings revealed that the incidental processing of misspelled logotypes (e.g., SASMUNG) affects the accuracy of logotype identity recognition, thereby underscoring the challenges faced by individuals when identifying brand names and the elements that make counterfeits so effective.
品牌名称是公司有价值的资产，通常伴随着独特的图形组合（即商标）。最近的研究表明，这种独特性使得品牌名称和商标容易受到通过转位拼写错误的假冒，在需要参与者识别正确拼写的任务中。然而，我们对品牌名称作为商标呈现时如何被偶然处理的理解并不完整。为了弥补这一知识空白，我们进行了一项虚拟现实实验，以探索转位字母混淆效应对品牌名称识别的影响。参与者沉浸在虚拟现实环境中，偶然接触到拼写正确的品牌名称或包含字母转位的商标。离线分析显示，参与者在识别拼写正确的品牌名称时比识别拼写错误的品牌名称更准确。此外，参与者对拼写错误的商标产生了错误记忆，将其回忆为拼写正确的商标。因此，我们的研究结果表明，对拼写错误的商标的偶然处理（例如，SASMUNG）会影响商标身份识别的准确性，从而强调了个人在识别品牌名称和使假冒品如此有效的元素时所面临的挑战。
