Three Cognitive Processing Model

It appears on the surface that the three cognitive processing models seem to build toward the next. ELM lays the primary groundwork by offering two routes of persuasion and the characteristics that lead an individual to choose one path or another. Further, the paths are mutually exclusive and rely on different characteristics to process. I had trouble differentiating between the ELM and the Heuristic model, as they seem quite similar. The key difference I could see was that heuristic processing was only marginally different from systematic processing, implying that the actual cognitive process was the same, it simply relied on different cues. Again, however, the cues that are used to reason are decided by the route one takes. Thus, it seems like a natural progression to the Unimodel, which breaks down the distinction between the two routes even further, basically claiming that there is no real difference between the two. Instead, the central and peripheral cues of the ELM seem to be at work at the same time. Ultimately, this uni-path model seems to help explain some of the shortcomings of the two-path models. Primarily by allowing for a seemingly obvious interaction between cues and message characteristics. However, I felt that the Unimodel was somewhat lacking in its explanation of outcomes. While the ELM and …show more content…
The concept of piggybacking is partly based on the ELM. Piggybacking refers to embedding politically relevant information into entertainment media, so that viewers may hope to incidentally learn political information. However, not enough research has been done to determine if this practice works through the central route due to the viewer being motivated to attend to entertainment media, or the peripheral route due to the relatively superficial nature of