Responding To the Screen

Reception and Reaction Processes

Jennings Bryant, Dolf Zillmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136690907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume takes the next step in the evolution of mass communication research tradition from effects to processes -- a more detailed and microanalytical analysis of the psychological processes involved in receiving and reacting to electronic media messages. This domain includes investigations into those psychological processes that occur between the process of selecting media messages for consumption and assessments of whatever processes mediate the long-term impact such message consumption may have on consumers' subsequent behavior. The editors strive to further understanding of some of the basic processes underlying the ways we gain entertainment and information.

PART

I

Reception and Reaction Process

CHAPTER

1

Paying Attention to Television

Daniel R. Anderson

John Burns

University of Massachusetts

It is surprising that there has been so little investigation into the nature of attention to television. Of the many thousands of empirical studies of television viewing and its effects, only a few dozen have included attention as a central focus, and a relatively few others have included attention as a subsidiary consideration. The lack of research is surprising for several reasons: (a) Television’s great effectiveness as a medium of mass communication is often attributed to its power of eliciting and maintaining attention; words such as “mesmerizing” are commonly used to describe this power, (b) Attention is often assumed to play a role in television’s impact. Most directly, TV is frequently declared as affecting attentional abilities, such as reducing children’s “attention spans.” (c) Most of television’s presumed impact, of course, is due to the content retained by the viewers. It is obvious, however, that content is not uniformly absorbed by viewers; rather, there are numerous levels of selection that go on as part of television use. Selective attention is surely an aspect of this process, and is therefore a potentially crucial intervening factor in the effects of content, (d) Finally, from the practical point of view of the television producer or sponsor, eliciting and maintaining attention is an essential ingredient in gaining an audience.

Despite a lack of widespread research effort, several research groups have systematically examined attention to television since the mid-1970s, and other researchers have provided additional information. The dozen years of research have provided consistent descriptive data on some aspects of attention to television and a great deal has been learned. This chapter provides a summary of the major findings. After some definitional considerations we examine visual, auditory, and intensive aspects of attention to television. We conclude with a brief mention of theoretical approaches to the problem and then indicate major areas in which research is needed.

Defining Attention to Television

Any general definition of attention will be somewhat unsatisfactory until a scientific consensus has been established on the fundamental nature of human information processing. Without such a consensus, definitions must be provisional. For our purposes here, we consider attention to be a set of overt and covert perceptual and orienting processes by means of which information becomes available to central information-processing activities. Attention thus serves to channel some information to be processed by central cognitive functions, whereas other information is excluded. The issue of how attention is controlled and directed provides a fundamental problem for psychology long associated with the difficult issues of will and consciousness (e.g., James, 1890; Pillsbury, 1908), problems with which psychology has not always been prepared to cope (cf. Johnston & Dark, 1986; Neisser, 1967).

Mainstream Research on Attention

In contrast to recent optimism expressed by Reeves, Thorson, and Schleuder (1986) to the effect that general research on attention can help cast light on attention to television, we find that such research has had relatively little to offer. Unfortunately, most research and theory on attention concerns stimuli and settings that are not particularly relevant to the television viewing situation. Stimuli are usually simple, repetitive, unimodal, and not particularly meaningful to the experimental subjects; time courses of stimulation often involve durations of milliseconds to a few seconds; and the context usually involves repetitive, boring, speeded tasks in laboratory settings (see Johnston & Dark, 1986; Parasuraman & Davies, 1984, for reviews).

Television viewing, in contrast, involves complex multimodal and meaningful stimulation experienced over a time period of minutes to hours. Television is usually experienced in a familiar, comfortable, and comforting environment (i.e., the viewer’s home) and rarely does the viewer have a specific externally assigned goal in viewing. With a few exceptions, then, principles of attention derived from nontelevision investigations, as interesting as they may be in their own right, do not have obvious face value for understanding the nature of attention to television. As such, researchers studying attention to television have largely been on their own, developing methodologies and theoretical concepts appropriate to television viewing. The difficulties of such methodological development probably account for the relatively small amount of research on attention to television.

Research on attention to television has been concerned primarily with three issues: visual orientation (looking) toward the TV screen, listening to TV, and intensity of attention to TV. Most of the published research concerns looking at television, a lesser amount concerns intensity of attention, and a very small amount concerns listening to TV. Subjects of the research have primarily been children.

VISUAL ATTENTION TO TELEVISION

Visual attention to television has been examined in two ways: visual orientation and visual fixation. Visual orientation is defined as head and eyes oriented toward the TV screen. Visual fixation is defined as the relatively precise location on the screen toward which the eyes are directed. Because visual orientation is far more easily measured than visual fixation, most research employs visual orientation as its measure of visual attention. We first summarize the research on visual orientation (usually called looking) and then briefly discuss visual fixation.

Looking at Television

Looking at television has been examined in “laboratory” situations and in home observational studies. Laboratory studies involve presentation of video material ranging from a few minutes to 2 hours duration, in a pleasantly furnished viewing room. Subjects may be videotaped, with the videotapes subsequently rated for visual orientation toward the TV. In some studies, rating of visual orientation may be done at the time the viewer is presented the TV program. The advantages of laboratory investigations are usually in terms of experimental control of the video material and viewing environment. The disadvantages are uncertain ecological validity and the relatively small amount of video material presented.

Home observation studies usually involve videotaping or filming naturally occurring television viewing over an extended period of time. These studies are relatively strong in terms of ecological validity and amount of viewing observed, but lack ready opportunities for experimental manipulation. Home observation studies are also very expensive. At this point, results obtained from home observation appear to be quite consistent with comparable results obtained from laboratory studies. There is no evidence that laboratory procedures that examine looking at television lack ecological validity.

A General Description of Looking at Television. Despite common intuitions to the contrary, looking at television is a highly variable activity. We have observed that viewers may look at and away from the TV screen hundreds of times an hour; they may look for long periods of time without looking away; or they may refrain from looking for long periods of time. These variations in looking behavior are related to a variety of individual differences, program variables, and situational factors. There are, nevertheless, common patterns, including the manner in which look lengths are distributed.

Examples of distributions of look lengths have been graphically provided in Anderson and Field (1983, chapter 8, this volume), and Anderson and Smith (1984). The distributions for both children and adults are remarkably similar. In general, the distributions are highly skewed such that most look lengths are of relatively brief duration, with extended looks of greater than 1 minute’s duration relatively infrequent. This observation is not inconsistent with a viewer being highly attentive: A viewer could have a few very long looks intermixed with a relatively large number of short looks. Most looking would be accounted for by the few very long looks.

In reanalyzing data from various published and unpublished investigations from our research group, we have found that the lognormal distribution adequately describes look lengths from individual child and adult viewers. A lognormal distribution (Atchinson & Brown, 1963) is present if, by taking the logarithm of the variable, the result is distributed normally. We found that the lognormal distribution nearly always describes look lengths substantially better than other plausible non-normal distributions (e.g., gamma, Erlang, Weibull, exponential). This observation has important theoretical consequences as described later in the section on attentional inertia.

Logically, every look at television is succeeded by a nonlooking period (called a pause). We have found that pauses also tend to be distributed according to a lognormal distribution. Again, these distributions are typical of those we find for children and adults either in the laboratory or observed at home.

Pursuing the idea that the lognormal distribution may characterize other kinds of maintained attention besides TV viewing, Hyewon Choi (1988) of our research group examined free play with toys by 5-year-olds. Identifying continuous episodes of play over 3 hours of observation for each child, she found that the lengths of play episodes were distributed lognormally in each of 10 children. Based on this finding, we consider it quite possible that the lognormal distribution may generally characterize the lengths of attention episodes in a variety of nontask situations. If so, attention to television may share general properties in common with attention in other undemanding situations, including self-generated activities.

Attentional Inertia. Anderson, Alwitt, Lorch, and Levin (1979) noted that the longer a look at television was in progress, the more likely it was to remain in progress. They called this phenomenon “attentional inertia” and pointed out that it was found in adults as well as young children. Such an increase in the probability of a look “surviving” (after about 1 second) is a consequence of the lognormal distribution of look lengths (Lee, 1980).

A major issue concerning attentional inertia is whether (a) there is an underlying change in attentional state as a look is maintained such that the viewer becomes increasingly engaged; or (b) attentional state is constant within a look but varies between looks – in this case the increasing conditional survival probability curves described by Anderson et al. (1979) are statistical artifacts produced by aggregating data from these varying states (Mendelson, 1983). Situation B is unlikely because the lognormal distribution cannot be created by such an aggregation of exponential distributions in which the conditional probability of survival does not change (Proschan, 1963). The major implication of this fact is that a dynamic process changes during the time course of a look and presumably underlies the maintenance of looks. We further consider this issue in the section on intensity of attention.

Individual Differences in Looking at Television. There are consistent individual differences in looking at television. Anderson et al. (1979) noted that there were session-to-session correlations of about .50 for percent looking and average look length for preschool children who viewed a variety of children’s programs and commercials. Three individual difference variables – intelligence, age, and gender – have been implicated.

In laboratory studies brighter children tend to have higher levels of looking at television although the correlations are not large (e.g., Field & Anderson, 1985). From our work observing TV viewing in homes (Anderson, Field, Collins, Lorch, & Nathan, 1985), we found a correlation of .26 between percent looking at TV and IQ among the 5-year-olds who were the focus of our research (unpublished analysis based on 99 children each observed over 10-day periods). Aletha Huston and John Wright at the University of Kansas also found positive correlations of IQ and looking in their investigations with children (Huston, personal communication, April 24, 1987). More extreme IQ differences are also reflected in different levels of looking at television: Grieve and Williamson (1977) found that mentally retarded individuals looked less at TV than normals, and that, among the mentally retarded subjects, the lower functioning individuals looked less than the higher functioning individuals.

Age contributes to individual differences in looking, especially during early childhood. Numerous laboratory investigations have found a great increase in looking at television from infancy to 5 years of age (see Anderson & Smith, 1984), and this increase has been verified in observations of home TV viewing (Anderson, Lorch, Field, Collins, & Nathan, 1986). Looking at TV levels off at between 60% and 70% during the school-age years and significantly declines among adults (Anderson et al., 1986).

We suggest that the age and IQ findings reflect the same general phenomenon: Up to a certain point, looking at television increases with increasing comprehensibility of the TV program (a hypothesis with empirical support, as described later). Among young children and the mentally retarded, brighter individuals find the programming more comprehensible as do older children. Beyond some further point, however, virtually all TV is comprehensible, as among adults. We would therefore expect no relationship of IQ and visual attention to TV among adults. To our knowledge, no such analysis has been reported.

Anderson et al. (1986) found that although there were no gender differences in looking at television among children observed at home, adult men looked at the TV a greater percentage of the time than did women. Bechtel, Achelpohl, and Akers (1972), without providing details, observed a similar effect. Although laboratory studies with children often find no gender differences in levels of looking, where such differences are found they are in the direction of boys looking more than girls (Alvarez, Huston, Wright, & Kerkman, 1988). It is possible, therefore, that there is some general tendency for males to look at television more than females. At this writing, however, the appropriate meta-analyses investigating this hypothesis have yet to be reported.

In addition to these standard individual difference variables, pathological states may also influence levels of visual attention to television. Lorch et al. (1987) found that school-aged children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) looked at an educational TV program about half as much as normal controls. The ADD children looked at the TV as frequently as the normals, but their looks averaged only half the duration. To our knowledge, other pathologies that involve attentional disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) have not been studied relative to looking at TV (see Sprafkin, Gadow, & Grayson, 1984, for a review).

Influence of the Local Environment on Looking. It is obvious that viewing context influences looking at TV; one would expect, for example, looking to be less in a nöisy singles bar than in a quiet home environment. Indeed, looking by children is reduced in a social context (Anderson, Lorch, Smith, Bradford, & Levin, 1981) and looking is especially reduced by the availability of alternative activities such as toys with which to play (Lorch, Anderson, & Levin, 1979; Pezdek & Hartman, 1983). The social environment also provides an attentional synergy: Anderson et al. (1981) found that a child’s looks at TV lead non-looking peers to initiate look...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• PART I RECEPTION AND REACTION PROCESSES
• Chapter 1 Paying Attention to Television
• Chapter 2 Children’s Comprehension Processes: From Piaget to Public Policy
• Chapter 3 Construct Accessibility: Determinants, Consequences, and Implications for the Media
• Chapter 4 Perceiving and Responding to Mass Media Characters
• Chapter 5 Television Viewing and Physiological Arousal
• Chapter 6 Empathy: Affect From Bearing Witness to the Emotions of Others
• Chapter 7 Fright Responses to Mass Media Productions
• Chapter 8 Online and Offline Assessment of the Television Audience
• Chapter 9 Evolving Cognitive Models in Mass Communication Reception Processes
• PART II RESPONDING TO PROGRAM GENRES
• Chapter 10 Responding to News and Public Affairs
• Chapter 11 Responding to Comedy: The Sense and Nonsense of Humor
• Chapter 12 The Logic of Suspense and Mystery
• Chapter 13 Responding to Horror: Determinants of Exposure and Appeal
• Chapter 14 Responding to Erotica: Perceptual Processes and Dispositional Implications
• Chapter 15 The Social Psychology of Watching Sports: From Iluim to Living Room
• Chapter 16 Perceiving and Processing Music Television
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Notes