THE ROLE OF MEMORY IN THE RECOGNITION OF TELEVISION NEWS MESSAGES (INFORMATION-PROCESSING, DEEP STRUCTURE, SURFACE).

摘要

Using a 3 x 2 x 2 experimental design, 170 subjects were exposed to a fictitious, but realistic, television news story about a forthcoming computer dating program sponsored by Indiana University. Four hypotheses were designed to test assumptions about the way television news viewers cognitively process the messages of the audio and video channels of a typical television news story.;The second hypothesis asserted that viewers remember what they see as having been heard more often than they remember what they hear as having been seen.;The third hypothesis asserted that mood, conveyed by the auditory channel, persists in memory longer than mood conveyed by the visual channel.;The fourth hypothesis asserted that enhanced attention to the channel source of a message would result in better memory for the substance of that message.;The first hypothesis--that memory of the channel source of a televised message fades over time--was based on cognitive theory that viewers encode a message into surface and deep structural memories. Surface memories, which identify channel source, decay faster, thus allowing for fading memory of channel source.;Undergraduate journalism majors were shown a news story that was varied by anchor lead, affect and time over twelve separate conditions. The results indicated support for the first and third hypotheses, but not for the second and fourth.;Message misattribution was greater in the delayed condition than in the immediate condition. This supported the first hypothesis.;Subjects remembered auditorially conveyed messages as having been seen more often than they remember visually conveyed messages as having been heard. This did not support the prediction made by the second hypothesis.;The third hypothesis was supported. Perceived mood of the news story was conveyed more accurately by the auditory channel than by the video portion of the message.;Hypothesis four was not supported. Subjects actually seemed to recognize auditory messages better when the announcer did not ask them to focus their attention on the auditory channel. As for video message recognition rates among the three types of anchor leads, those rates were virtually the same. Anchor lead had no effect on the recognition rates of these visually conveyed messages.