Mass communication’s impact has been shown at an individual level and in society at large, yet all mass communication must pass through the same narrow gateway before having these varied effects. Unless people receive mass communication through their eyes, ears, or touch, and cognitively process it, it is powerless. This is why researchers are interested in studying attention – it is a necessary condition for all mass communication effects. Attention is a central factor in understanding what it means to watch television, read the newspaper, listen to the radio, or use the Internet. It has an impact on what type and magnitude of effects result from media. Although attention is a part of receiving and processing messages from all types of media, television has drawn most of the attention research. Consequently, much of what we know about attention comes from research on attention to television.
What Do We Mean By Attention?
Attention As Focus
In everyday terms, “paying attention” describes the way we look and listen intently to see and hear a stimulus such as another person or a mass medium. However, in cognitive mass communication research, “attention” has a more precise meaning – a state of cognitive focus on a particular stimulus. Looking and listening are external manifestations of attention, not the attention itself. Attention thus involves directing sensory organs toward the acquisition of messages and other stimuli and allocating cognitive resources toward processing them. As such, it is the first step in prominent models and theories used in media psychology research. For example, the information-processing model of active media learning depicts cognitive processing as a linear path where attention to media must occur before information recognition or elaboration. Likewise, Albert Bandura’s social cognition theory, a foundational theory for much research on social-behavioral effects of mass communication, places attention as the first of four processes through which audiences learn and repeat behavior modeled in mass communication. Television viewers must first focus on a character’s behavior before that behavior can go through retention, motivational, and production processes.
Although attention as cognitive focus sounds like a singular construct, there are in fact two separate aspects: (1) where cognitive focus is directed (an either/or matter) and (2) the amount of effort directed to it. The two are of course related, but they often appear as quite different research issues or involve different operationalizations. Clearly, if one’s focus is not directed to a message then no effort is involved; and if one attempts to focus on more than one stimulus at once, the amount of effort on each may be limited. But beyond such cases, questions about where one focuses and the amount of cognitive resources applied are simply different, despite carrying the same label. We also need to distinguish between “attention” and “selection.” Selection refers to processes that lead to attention, particularly the first, direction-of-focus, meaning.
Operational Definitions Of Attention
Attention to mass media is operationally defined and measured in a number of ways. Selfreports can allow people to state what stimulus received their attention or how much effort they directed to it. Visual regard (eyes on screen) clearly suggests attention is given to a stimulus when people look at it, but, as noted below, can also inform us about the amount of effort. Cardiac deceleration often occurs when a new stimulus is introduced, suggesting that heart rate can indicate attention. Likewise, depressed alpha power in electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring seems to be an orienting response indicating the onset of attention and an indication of more effortful subsequent processing as attention continues. Most recently, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research shows patterns of cortical activity associated with attention and shifts in attention. One of the first experiments to apply fMRI methods specifically to media attention found a distributed cortical network activated by “coherent, edited video action sequences,” but not by randomly edited video (Anderson et al. 2006, 21). This network, which plausibly helps make sense of comprehensible film and video sequences, contained individual regions previously associated with selective visual attention and other reception processes.
It is important to note that all of these operationalizations are indirect measures of attention. They seem to indicate that attention is occurring or in other cases to indicate degree of activation, but they cannot specify for sure what thoughts or other cognitive processes actually take place.
What Causes Attention?
Most research pursuing this question is directed at the first (i.e., where focused) aspect of attention, although the same question can apply to amount of cognitive effort as well. There are two classes of answers. The first is that attention stems from an automatic biological drive to attend to new or changing stimuli, resulting in involuntary orienting responses to the medium or some feature within it. The second is that attention is a controlled and strategic process (though perhaps overlearned and automatic). Although the two explanations have often been posed as competitive, it is clear that both operate.
Medium-Directed Processes
Orienting responses are based on the basic biological tendency to orient oneself toward changes in one’s environment (a survival response before “fight-or-flight,” for example). A typical mass communication orienting response occurs when people who are not looking at the television turn and look in reaction to a sound or brightness change in a TV program, or perhaps to devices such as cuts between scenes or object movement, whether representing character actions or camera pans (collectively, these stimuli have been referred to as “formal features”). Such reactive causes of attention can also be seen in other indicators of attention and with other media, such as cardiac orienting responses during voice changes in radio messages (Potter 2000). Early television attention research assumed a very broad role for the orienting reflex, such as eliciting children’s attention during educational moments of Sesame Street by associating those moments with cues that would demand the response, and it has been the basis of anti-television positions arguing that television turns viewers into mindless hypnotics captured by its formal features. Orienting responses occur quickly and often in response to very brief stimuli, and have been quite important in research on limited cognitive capacity for communication.
Audience-Directed Processes
Despite an initial inclination to interpret children’s attention to Sesame Street as largely due to orienting responses, research led by Daniel Anderson in the late 1970s and early 1980s encountered results that did not fit well with that explanation. Similar stimuli (with adult males vs adult females, different kinds of audio cues) produced more or less visual attention, or the onset, continuation, and offset of the same stimulus might be equally likely to initiate looking (Anderson & Lorch 1983). A key study experimentally retained the exact same formal features, but altered their comprehensibility through scene order changes or foreign language audio. Even children as young as 2 years looked on the basis of comprehensibility rather than the presence or absence of the formal features (Anderson & Kirkorian 2006). In other words, the correlations between formal features and visual attention, even in very young children, are not simply (and perhaps not even mainly) due to orienting responses. Instead, the association apparently results from learning associations between formal features and types of television content, which then allows the viewer to use the features as cues for attention management (Anderson & Kirkorian 2006). The associations between meaningful information and formal features of content become richly developed, enabling viewers to be very efficient at strategically looking at television only at moments most likely to give them the information they desire. As viewers learn to expect the type of information they will find with formal features, attentional responses based on those expectations can become essentially automatic (Lorch et al. 1979). Viewers can also form a style of strategic viewing by using expectations based on content such as story grammar and not just formal features (Hawkins et al. 1995). The reader should beware of a tendency to associate medium-directed causes with low levels of cognitive effort and audience-directed causes with more effort (e.g., “passive” vs “active” attention). There may possibly be some such correlation, but it is not conclusively established, let alone absolute.
What’s Going On During Attention?
Limits To And Division Of Attention
According to cognitive science, the brain has a limited capacity for processing information; if it were to try to fully process all information from all available sources, it would suffer from information overload. Attentional processes protect the brain against that overload (Allport 1989). If multiple stimuli are potentially providing information, attentional mechanisms may allocate more cognitive resources to one stimulus and less to the others to accommodate limited processing capacity. For example, a person might pay primary attention to surfing the Internet, but also lightly monitor a television. If an important word or sound came across the television, the person might shift primary attention to the television. Researchers such as Lang and colleagues (2006) and Armstrong and Chung (2000) study how the limited cognitive resources allocated through attention might be split between media and other activities. Getting people to shift attention from one stimulus to another is a common experimental technique used to determine how much cognitive effort people give to a stimulus.
Attentional Inertia
Anderson coined the term “attentional inertia” to describe the widely observed but counterintuitive phenomenon that look lengths are distributed in a log-normal way (much of what is described below comes from research on television, but similar results were obtained when the phenomenon was explored with other media or activities). That is, short looks are much more common than long ones (with the limit that there are relatively few shorter than a half-second). Typically, 40 percent of looks at a television program are 1.5 seconds or less, and only about 10 percent of all looks are longer than 15 seconds. Based on this and other findings, Anderson proposed that looks become progressively more stable and reflect greater cognitive processing the longer they continue, and findings on decreasing distractibility and increasing learning the longer looks have been in progress has supported this interpretation (Anderson & Kirkorian 2006). An interesting consequence of attentional inertia is that it may be able to drive attention across content boundaries and thus be an important involuntary basic converse to habituation. However, some recent research suggests that inertia at boundaries may be affected as much or more by strategic as by nonstrategic processes, leaving the nature but not the consequences of attentional inertia uncertain (Hawkins et al. 2002).
A related set of research has examined whether looks of different lengths might also reflect different causes. Surprisingly, viewers who employ a relatively high percentage of very short looks (under 1.5 seconds) comprehend more than those whose look distribution contains a high proportion of only slightly longer looks (1.5 –5.5 seconds). Hawkins et al. (1997) suggested that the very shortest looks (which they called “monitoring looks”) reflect a strategy of mentally checking television content regularly to direct attention when it would be most useful for comprehension, and that the slightly longer looks (which they called “orienting looks”) might have been longer because viewers were having to figure out what was going on from scratch.
What Does Attention Do?
As an allocation of varying degrees of cognitive effort toward a media stimulus, attention plays a role in most, possibly every, cognitive, affective, and behavioral media effect. Although this is the case, most attention research has focused on attention’s impact on learning and the physiological responses used in operationally defining attention.
Attention is a necessary condition for learning, and greater attention can lead to better learning of central information and reduced learning of incidental information. Note that time spent looking at the television is not necessarily related to better learning or comprehension of material, as indicated by the comparison of shorter and longer looks mentioned above. Also as discussed earlier, attention to television can lead to the learning of expectations about content based on salient formal features and story grammar, which are then used for strategic monitoring. Apart from strategic viewer goals, some research also suggests that attention elicited by formal features can increase comprehension and memory (Anderson & Burns 1991). For example, rapid and moderate action can draw attention to central story content, increasing its comprehension for elementary school children (Calvert et al. 1982). Increasing the rate of edits in a program may increase memory by increasing attention to and encoding of television message content without significantly increasing cognitive load (Lang et al. 2000).
While increasing attention to television can improve learning from it, television often leads to less learning than other methods of real-life instruction. (This is labeled “video deficit.”) Having a television on in the background can serve as a distraction, disrupting attention given to play or other learning activities such as homework.
Are There Medium Differences In Attention?
Attention research across different media is too scant to provide a conclusive answer to this question, though it is reasonable to assume that the same basic cognitive mechanisms underlie attention no matter what the medium. Differences in attention strategy and level may result, however, from the varying features of different media and the way in which people interact with them.
Print media such as newspapers require readers to actively seek information by turning pages, scanning for articles of interest, and skimming articles to find interesting information. This amount of effort and these strategies for finding information differ from those of television, where viewers have the option of being much more passive. This does not mean all readers give the same amount of effort to reading, since there are likely varying levels of automaticity in carrying out these strategies. Print media also provide more content control than television (e.g., readers can slow down their reading pace, back up to reread sentences, skip sections, and read selections out of order). Attention strategies for audio-only media such as radio or MP3 players may be similar to those used for the audio portions of television, but differences in how and where attention is focused without a visual component in the message should be investigated. Computer-mediated communication such as the world wide web and learning software often combines the features of print, audio, and video. It also adds unique structures such as hypertext, which allows users to seek further information in which they are interested, and pop-up windows and banner ads that often interrupt or divide attention.
All of these variables have the potential for affecting where and how much attention is given to a message at a point in time. More research is needed within individual media and comparing media to better understand the extent to which attention processes and strategies are similar or different across media.
References:
- Allport, A. (1989). Visual attention. In M. I. Posner (ed.), Foundations of cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 631– 682.
- Anderson, D. R., & Burns, J. (1991). Paying attention to television. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (eds.), Responding to the screen. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 3 –25.
- Anderson, D. R., & Kirkorian, H. L. (2006). Attention and television. In J. Bryant & P. Vorderer (eds.), Psychology of entertainment. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 35 –54.
- Anderson, D. R., & Lorch, E. P. (1983). Looking at television: Action or reaction? In J. Bryant & D. R. Anderson (eds.), Children’s understanding of television: Research on attention and comprehension. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–30.
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