Recognition versus recall

The issue of recall versus recognition has long been the subject of a heated debate within the field of advertising research. Both the recall and recognition measures assess traces of advertising in memory, but they differ in that the former is a verbal prompt while the latter entails a visual experience. In a attempt to settle this debate, several studies on recall and recognition by some of the field's most renowned figures are re-examined, current scientific views of brain hemispheric theories and of memory are reviewed, and experiments examining comparative measures for recall and recognition are conducted. These efforts show that it should not be an issue of recognition versus recall since the two types of measures have different implications. The real issue is understanding what each technique is trying to quantify and what can be 'typically expected' from these measures under different circumstances.