As a matter of course this would hold true only as far as size and repetition are concerned.  Many other factors have to be considered besides.  Some of these could even be studied with our material.  We could study from our results what memory-value is attached to the various forms of type or suggestive words, what influence to illustrations, how far they reinforce the impressiveness and how far they draw away the attention from the name and the object, how these various factors influence men and women differently, and so on.  Other questions, however, demand entirely different forms of experiment.  We may examine the effects of special contrast phenomena, of unusual background, of irregular borders and original headings.  The particular position of the advertisement also deserves our psychological interest.  The magazines receive higher prices for the cover pages and the newspapers for advertisements which are surrounded by reading matter.  In both cases obvious practical motives are decisive.  The cover page comes into the field of vision more frequently.  What is surrounded by reading matter is less easily overlooked.

But the newspaper world hardly realizes how much other variations of position influence the psychological effect.  Starch[51] made experiments in which he did not use real advertisements, but meaningless syllables so as to exclude the influence of familiarity with any announcement.  He arranged little booklets, each of 12 pages, on which a syllable such as lod, zan, mep, dut, yib, and so on was printed in the middle of each page.  Each of his 50 subjects glanced over the book and then wrote down what syllables remained in memory.  He found that the syllables which stood on the first and last page were remembered by 34 persons, those on the second and eleventh by about 26, and those on the eight other pages by an average of 17 persons.  In the next experiment he printed one syllable in the middle of the upper and one in the middle of the lower half of each page.  The results now showed that of those syllables which were remembered 54 per cent stood on the upper half and 46 per cent on the lower half of the page.  Finally, he divided every page into four parts and printed one syllable on the middle of each fourth of a page.  The results showed that of the remembered syllables 28 per cent stood on the left-hand upper fourth, 33 per cent on the right-hand upper fourth, 16 per cent left-hand lower, and 23 per cent right-hand lower.  A fourth-page advertisement which is printed on the outer side of the upper half of the page thus probably has more than twice the psychological value of one which is printed on the inner side of the lower half.  The economic world spends millions every year for advertisements on the upper right-hand side and millions for advertisements on the lower left-hand side, and is not aware that one represents twice the value of the other.  These little illustrations of advertisement experiments may suffice to indicate how much haphazard methods are still prevalent in the whole field of economic psychotechnics, methods which would not be tolerated in the sphere of physical and chemical technology.