How Attention Partitions Itself during Simultaneous Message Presentations

Autor/inn/en	Bergen, Lori; Grimes, Tom; Potter, Deborah
Titel	How Attention Partitions Itself during Simultaneous Message Presentations
Quelle	In: Human Communication Research, 31 (2005) 3, S.311-336 (26 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0360-3989
DOI	10.1111/j.1468-2958.2005.tb00874.x
Schlagwörter	Television Viewing; Attention Span; Cognitive Processes; Programming (Broadcast); Visual Stimuli; Perception; News Reporting; Sensory Integration + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Fernsehkonsum; Cognitive process; Kognitiver Prozess; Programmgestaltung; Wahrnehmung; News report; Reportage; Sensorische Integration
Abstract	Television producers, across all types of programming, assume young viewers can parallel process simultaneously presented messages. For instance, television news producers appear to believe that young viewers can attend to weather icons, lexical news crawls, and sports scores while they also attend to news anchors who present the news. Nonetheless, attention theory suggests parallel processing on this scale cannot be executed efficiently. Given the format's popularity, perhaps those messages take advantage of perceptual grouping, as described by Treisman, Kahneman, and Burkell (1983). Perceptual grouping describes a process where separate but semantically related messages are attended to simultaneously with minimal effort. Using secondary task methodology, we measured participants' attentional capacity while they watched an example of this format: CNN's Headline News. In addition to this visually complex condition, we created a visually simple condition by deleting graphics and news crawls. Participants in this latter condition attended to both the auditory and visual channels, thus retaining story facts conveyed by both channels. Participants in the complex condition, however, shifted attention to the auditory channel. Ten percent of the factual information contained in news stories was lost to participants. It appears that this multimessage format exceeded viewers' attentional capacity. In conclusion, we discuss the implications for attention theory. (Author).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10