Assesses the variable amounts of attention that are required for a viewer to process two kinds of interruptions common to television: the shift from one message to a different, unexpected message; and the reference to previously presented material. Interprets results in terms of limited capacity and attentional inertia models of attention. (RS)

Summarizes results from a series of psychological experiments about how people process information from television and discusses the results in relation to six issues, including size of stimulus units and complexity of television stimuli. (DF)

Examines the relationship between development of story schema skills and strategies children adopt for attending to and remembering television narratives. Finds advanced story schema skills were related to reduced processing effort, increased memory of central story content, greater flexibility of allocation strategies, and better coordination…

Measured children's identification with and perceived reality of television characters and children's rating of peers on 11 traits. Found, among other results, that identification with television characters was a significant predictor of the mean evaluation of peers, and that television viewing was a significant predictor of the variance in…

Studies the relationship between children's perceptions of the news and learning, and the effect of televised news story context on their perceptions. Explores the effect of news story context on learning through perceptual variables: liking the story, liking the program, believing the story, and understanding the function of the story. (JMF)

Results of a study conducted with 721 fourth, sixth, and eighth graders were not supportive of the assumed role of children's perceived reality of television in determining the impact of exposure to television on children's social behavior. (GT)

Tested the idea that exposure to television people could affect children's judgments of a real person introduced after watching television. Found that television can prime traits and provide a frame of reference for use in encoding new information about people. (PD)

Tests the proposition that message structure (cuts) affects attention to television differently, depending on whether the cuts link related or unrelated content. Finds cuts in unrelated sequences require more attention than cuts in related sequences. (NH)

Examines hemispheric differences in cortical arousal as a function of positive and negative emotional television scenes. Finds that (1) the processing of emotional content is hemispherically asymmetric; and (2) negative material produced greater cortical arousal in the right hemisphere and positive material greater arousal in the left. (MS)

Examines research on media effect on children over three epochs: film (1904-1939), radio (1930-1944), and television (1949 through the 1960s). Observes an overwhelming similarity in the research studies, concluding that earlier studies may have set the agenda for research and that the same concerns exist with each new technology. (PD)