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In F.T. Durso Et al (Eds.), (2007) Handbook of applied cognition (2nd ed.) . (pp. 659-682). Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Cognition and Media
Richard Jackson Harris, Elizabeth T. Cady, and Christopher P. Barlett
Kansas State University
Here is a little quiz. Do each of the following as best you can.
- Hum the theme music from the movie Jaws.
- Sing Thriller by Michael Jackson.
3. Name the six characters on Friends.
Most people can accurately do each of the above, because it is virtually impossible to escape the influence of mass media. It is not the scope of this chapter to attempt to define exactly what the mass media are, because the concept of media is evolving and means different things to different people. While mass media have traditionally been seen as encompassing print (newspapers and magazines) and electronic/broadcast (radio and television), recent technology has blurred the distinctions between media and entertainment and between mass and personal media. Such activities as using the Internet, watching movies, or playing video games are often considered a part of media. People spend more time each week watching television than in any other activity except sleeping and working (Harris, 2004). In 2003, 13- and 14-year-olds spent almost 14 hours a week watching television and almost 17 hours on the Internet (J. Weaver, 2003a). Seventy per cent of college students play video games at least “once in a while” (J. Weaver, 2003b). Moreover, there are around 1500 daily and 8000 weekly newspapers and over 11,000 different magazines published in the U.S. (Wilson & Wilson, 1998).
Mass media can benefit society by reporting daily news, playing the Top 40 music hits, or televising public service announcements. However, there are also some negative aspects to media. For example, violent television and video games have been blamed for everything from a casual attitude toward mayhem to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Whether positive or negative, the mass media clearly do affect people’s lives. Although social psychologists have been studying these effects for decades, only more recently have cognitive psychologists seriously begun to look at mass media, exploring their effects on certain cognitive processes. This chapter discusses the general cognitive processes of attention, comprehension and memory, and decision making, and discusses how the media influences each. Media are a major source of knowledge, and how individuals process that information is vitally important to understanding their effects on attitudes and behavior.
Attention
Attention has long been an important area of study in cognitive psychology. Sternberg (2003) defines attention as a means of reducing the total amount of information that exists in the environment to a smaller amount that affords further processing, making attention clearly relevant to the mass media with its abundance of information. Specifically, cognitive psychologists studying media effects are concerned with allocation of attention and multi-tasking of media, both of which greatly affect media consumers and producers.
Allocation of Attention to Media
Since the media often contain large quantities of information, and people have limited processing ability, much media content is necessarily only incompletely processed. Although this issue applies to all media, research has predominantly focused on how people allocate attention to television. Although the average person watches 3-4 hours of television a day, having the television on does not necessarily mean that everyone in the room is fully attending to it. When the television is on, adults and children will only attend to it between 58 and 75 % of the time (Schmitt, Woolf, & Anderson, 2003).
However, children do not attend to all television equally. They attend more to television when they fully comprehend the program (Anderson, Lorch, Field, & Sanders, 1981). For example, children pay more attention to child-based content than adult-based content (Luecke-Aleksa, Anderson, Collins, & Schmitt, 1995) and attend to children’s television programs twice as much when no toys are present in the room competing for their attention as when toys are present (Lorch, Anderson, & Levin, 1979). Cognitive development is enhanced when actively attending to educational television programming (Anderson, Bryant, Wilder, Santomero, Williams, & Crawley, 2000), and children attend better to television programs when there are short scenes, much movement, and purposeful character behavior (Schmitt, Anderson, & Collins, 1999).
Sometimes a media message may require considerable attentional resources, and other times much fewer. This distinction is captured by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which posits two methods through which the consumer may be persuaded (Petty, Priester, & Briñol, 2002). The central route involves active processing of the content by a thinking person, while the peripheral route assumes a more direct effect of the superficial aspects of the media or message (e.g., attractiveness of source) on a relatively passive viewer. Persuasion through the peripheral route requires little attention allocation and occurs when the person has low motivation or inadequate background knowledge needed to process the message. Motivation to attend to a message for central processing would occur when the person believes that the information has relevance or wants to learn more and elaborate on that information. When such elements are missing, superficial aspects of the message, such as a sexy model or the presence of a celebrity spokesperson, may lead to persuasion through the peripheral route (Petty et al., 2002). The ELM also relates to comprehension and decision-making, which will be discussed later in the chapter.
Media and Multi-tasking
Seldom do people sit and actively attend to only the medium in front of them. Rather, they often multi-task, dividing their attention between the media source and an unrelated task. Simultaneously attending to two messages or activities that require controlled (conscious) processing is very difficult due to the limited capacity of attentional resources). Researchers have examined performance on certain cognitive tasks, such as reading comprehension or recalling
information, in the presence of certain media such as music or television.
Ransdell and Gilroy (2001) found that when background music was playing, undergraduates showed disrupted writing fluency (words generated per minute) while writing essays, suggesting that background music consumes cognitive resources. Likewise, attending to music can hinder other tasks. For instance, attending to song lyrics while driving is distracting and negatively impacts driving performance (Anderson, Carnagey, & Eubanks, 2003). Individuals tend to drive significantly faster when listening to fast tempo music compared to slow tempo or no music (Brodsky, 2001). In a simulated driving vigilance task, listening to high intensity music increased reaction time for stimuli in the periphery in a high demand condition (Beh & Hirst, 1999). These studies suggest that music may have a negative effect on driving under difficult conditions.
Like background music, background television can adversely affect performance on certain cognitive tasks. Armstrong and Chung (2000) found that students reading newspaper articles later scored lower on recall tasks if television had been on in the background. Pool, Koolstra, and van der Voort (2003) found that Dutch children’s homework completion time and total number of correct answers was hindered by a Dutch-language soap opera in the background but not by an English-language music video or no television at all (which may be a function of the differing languages of the media modality). Armstrong and Sopory (1997) found that background television had a negative effect on performance on the Brooks Visual-Spatial Working Memory Task. Although much of this research has shown that people have great difficulty simultaneously performing two tasks requiring conscious attention, this is not always so. Wickens (2002) offered an explanation for this apparent inconsistency by arguing that there is less interference in multi-tasking if the two stimuli do not use the same sensory modalities or coding channels (e.g., auditory vs. visual). This helps explain why many people are better able to perform two very different tasks that require conscious attention, such as solving algebra problems and listening to music.
Sometimes there may be performance decrements even when people believe they can successfully multi-task two different tasks simultaneously. For example, many people drive while using a cell phone, not only to talk but also to browse the Internet, watch a movie, answer e-mail, instant message, or play games. Research using driving simulators has shown, however, that drivers talking on either hand-held or hands-free cell phones make more driving errors and have longer reaction times than those not using the phones. In some cases the distraction can impair a driver as much or more than being legally drunk or slow the reaction time of a twenty-year-old to that of the average seventy-year-old (Strayer, Drews, Crouch, & Johnston, 2005; Strayer, Drews, & Johnston, 2003; Matthews, Legg, & Charlton, 2003).
Thus, although a considerable degree of multi-tasking with media sources is possible, it comes at a serious cost to performance on some other activity like driving or doing homework.
Comprehension and Memory
Comprehension of both linguistic and pictorial information in media involves many cognitive structures and processes, such as working memory to store and transform information, knowledge schemata to organize construction of memory representations, and cognitive heuristics to guide retrieval. In addition, individuals must possess sufficient background knowledge of the topic in order to fully comprehend the material (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). Since the process of comprehension thus has direct ramifications for the quality and quantity of material later remembered, comprehension and memory will be considered together in this section.
Long-term Working Memory
Traditionally, working memory was conceived of as the momentary storage of information needed to complete an immediate cognitive task. This type of memory has limits on both the amount and duration of the information and does not have the flexibility to allow individuals to stop a cognitive activity, in contrast to reading, which requires memory to keep track of plot and characters, and then resume the activity without decreased performance or the need to review information already read (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). To correct for this limitation of the working memory model, Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) introduced the concept of long-term working memory (LTWM), which allows for greater flexibility, although it requires domain-specific knowledge in the area of discourse. In terms of media, long-term working memory allows us to keep track of all the characters and plots in a complicated movie or novel over a longer time frame than what is available in traditional working memory (Butcher & Kintsch, 2003). For example, an individual can watch a mystery movie and remember critical information and clues long enough to solve the mystery. Previously read information is stored in long-term memory as the new information is processed, and any connections between the two serve as the retrieval cues underlying LTWM (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).
Skill involved in LTWM consists of using easily retrieved cues in short-term working memory to rapidly recover information from long-term memory. Since long-term memory has a theoretically unlimited capacity, experts on a topic can readily store huge amounts of information about that topic. When media consumers watch a television show or read a magazine, their LTWM performs two functions. The first involves the immediate activation of background knowledge of the situation, which remains in LTWM in case it is needed for making an inference to understand the new material. This prerequisite knowledge arises from a lifetime of social and sensory experience, as well as knowledge of consistent patterns in certain media genres (Butcher & Kintsch, 2003). The second use of LTWM in comprehension involves the maintenance of the situation model constructed throughout the reading process. In other words, the reader or viewer understands the input by making inferences and building a model of the events. As the reader or viewer learns new information, LTWM keeps the model activated so it can be updated (Butcher & Kintsch, 2003).
Schemata
Encoding information into long-term memory draws upon schemata, structures of knowledge in the long-term memory of the perceiver. These cognitive structures become the framework for accepting incoming episodic information, which then becomes integrated into a memory representation that reflects both the prior schematic information and the new stimulus input (Bartlett, 1932; Brewer & Nakamura, 1984).
While schemata provide a framework for encoding new information, integration between the two sources of information has been argued to occur at the situation model or mental model level of representation (Kintsch, 1998). A situation model involves the activation and integration of both mental schemata and currently attended information in the environment, leading to the observer’s real-time monitoring and understanding of the situation, environments, and other individuals (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Such integration at the level of the situation model ultimately leads to schema modification. If the new information is congruent with the activated schema, the information will be integrated into the existing schema. If the information is incongruent, accommodation occurs, which may result in the formation of a new schema.
Although we generally form and modify schemata through direct experience, certain schemata may be formed through vicarious experience, especially through the media (Harris, 2004). For example, a teenager growing up in rural Nebraska might have a schema about life in New York City, although she has never visited there. Instead, she might build her knowledge base from information gained from both entertainment and news media. Thus, her schema relies heavily on the view of reality projected by the producers of that media. Similarly, another teenager living in Los Angeles might form a schema of rural life based on what he sees in the media, which would necessarily reflect the views of the media producers, who may have limited life experience with rural life. Media might also inform the contents of schemata about certain groups of individuals, such as ethnic minorities or people from other countries. The influence of the media on this knowledge base increases as the amount of life experience with those groups decreases.
In addition, stored schemata may affect comprehension of media events (Harris, 2004). For example, a person watching a basketball game on television follows the events of the game by using schematic information about basketball to understand the actions of the players or referees. The same happens in media entertainment genres, especially if the viewer can identify in some way with the characters or situations in the show, which allows the viewer to retrieve particular schemata to comprehend the plot. For example, a teenager watching a teen drama will comprehend it differently than an adult viewer. In much the same way that schemata guide understanding of real world events, comprehension of the media proceeds using previously known information.
Activity schemata, called scripts, organize information about events and aid in comprehending events or the media. Low and Durkin (2000) found that even young children ages 5 to 11 use a script to comprehend television shows. The children were shown one of two abridged versions of a crime drama. One version showed the story in the common form (i.e. scenes in the order of crime, investigation, chase, arrest, and court), while the other rearranged the same scenes. The youngest children recalled the story best when they saw the common form, although older children were able to understand the other version, indicating that while young children use well-defined scripts to understand television, older children display more flexibility (Low & Durkin, 2000).
Framing
Framing by the media involves choices made by producers regarding what information to provide the public and how to communicate it. One important use of a frame is to inform the public what issues it should think of as important (Cohen, 1963), what communications researchers call “agenda-setting” (McCombs & Reynolds, 2002). The frame of a news report thus affects how viewers understand the issue under discussion. The media employ frames to emphasize certain aspects of the world while downplaying others. By doing so, they help ensure that the input is attended to and comprehended in certain ways (Entman, 1993). For example, if the media are the only source from which people acquire information about a particular sport, fans will only learn what fits into the frame employed by the media.
On a more local scale, even a minor change in the wording of an advertisement may activate a frame, which then guides cognitive processing. For example, consider meat advertised as “75 per cent lean” versus “only 25 per cent fat.” Consumers evaluate the former more favorably than the semantically identical latter wording (Levin & Gaeth, 1988). Similarly, most consumers prefer receiving a “discount” rather than a “surcharge,” even if the final cost is the same. A positive frame leads to construction of a more positive image of the product.