The Effects of Related and Unrelated Cuts on Television Viewers' Attention, Processing Capacity, and Memory

Abstract

This study tested the differential effects of two different types of cuts (related and unrelated) on attention, capacity, and audio and visual memory for the information contained in television messages. Related cuts were related by either visual or audio information. Unrelated cuts occurred between two completely unrelated scenes. Unrelated cuts were always associated with a change in content. Related scenes were never associated with a change in content. Results showed that both related and unrelated cuts resulted in cardiac orienting responses. Reaction times were slower immediately following unrelated cuts than when following related cuts, indicating that processing unrelated cuts required more capacity than processing related cuts. Memory was better for information presented after related cuts than it was for information presented after unrelated cuts. This effect was greater for visual memory than for audio memory. These results add to the growing body of knowledge on how people process television.

Negative video as structure: Emotion, attention, capacity, and memory

“…If a structural feature elicits an orienting response, this results in additional processing resources being allocated to the task of encoding the television message (A. Lang, 1995a;A. Lang, Geiger, Strickwerda, & Sumner, 1993).…”

“…Lang, 1995a;A. Lang, Geiger, Strickwerda, & Sumner, 1993) makes two major assumptions about watching television: 1) Viewers are information processors who perceive, allocate capacity to, decode, process, encode, and store television messages; and, 2) Viewers have a limited capacity of processing resources available to distribute across these aspects of processing.…”

A Survey for Measure the Digital Art Presence

“…[11] organized and summarized various telepresence self-statement evaluation criteria used in aforementioned studies and created criteria of mass media telepresence criteria consisting of 8 items and utilized them in the empirical study. Other than them, icon criteria applied to television developed by SAM created in 1980 were used by Lang, Gieger, Strickwerda & Summer (1993) [26]. Slater, Usoh & Steeds (1994) created SUS (Slater, Usoh, & Steeds) questionnaires, and IJsselsteijn, Ridder, Hamberg, Bouwhuis & Freeman (1998) [27] created SSCQE survey.…”

Responding to Change on TV: How Viewer-Controlled Changes in Content Differ From Programmed Changes in Content

“…Geiger and Reeves (1993) reported that reaction times probed 1 second after unrelated cuts were slower than reaction times probed 1 second after related cuts. Lang and colleagues (Lang, Geiger, Strickwerda, & Sumner, 1993) reported that people oriented to both related and unrelated cuts, but memory was better for information presented immediately after related cuts than it was for information presented immediately after unrelated cuts.…”

“…The heart-rate data were tested for a significant time main effect, plotted and visually inspected to see if the pattern of data is monophasic or biphasic, then subjected to trend analysis to test the significance of either the quadratic (monophasic) or cubic (biphasic) trend. This operational definition has been widely used in studies with mediated messages (i.e., Lang, 1990;Lang et al, 1993;Potter, 2000).…”