Dan G. Drew

Audio-Visual Redundancy and TV News Recall:

This experimental study examines the effects of audio and visual redundancy on recall and story understanding in television news. College students viewed a series of voice-over news stories that varied in the amount of redundancy between the two channels and then responded to both auditory and visual recall measures. The results show higher auditory recall and story understanding in the high-redundancy condition than in the lower redundancy conditions. Visual recall shows the reverse pattern with higher recall scores in the lower redundancy conditions than in the high-redundancy condition.

Voter Learning in the 1992 Presidential Election: Did the “Nontraditional” Media and Debates Matter?

This study is based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 504 adult Indiana residents from 21 October to 2 November 1992. Through hierarchical multiple regression analyses it seeks to test whether more exposure and attention to “nontraditional” news media (such as television “talk shows” and the morning TV network shows) predicted more knowledge of the issue positions of the candidates, a greater likelihood of voting, or more interest in the campaign. Statistical controls for demographics, traditional news media exposure and attention, and presidential debate exposure are introduced. This study also examines whether more exposure and attention to the traditional news media of radio, television, and newspapers, as well as exposure to the televised presidential debates, is associated with more campaign interest and knowledge after controlling for various demographics.

Effects of disturbing televised events on the acquisition of information from subsequently presented commercials.

Abstract Male and female respondents were exposed to a television news program containing commercials. Immediately following exposure to either an emotionally disturbing or an innocuous, affectively neutral news story, respondents watched a sequence of standard news items mixed with commercials. The placement of 30-second commercials was systematically varied through three time slots: immediately following the experimental pretreatment (0.0–0.5 min); delayed by two minutes (2.0–2.5 min); or delayed by four minutes (4.0–4.5 min). A surprise recognition/recall test, measuring information acquisition of the content of the commercials, was administered. Compared with the control condition, the acquisition of information from the commercials following the emotionally charged, disturbing story was significantly poorer for a period of two and one-half minutes. No appreciable difference in information acquisition was observed thereafter. The apparent impairment of information acquisition, processing, and retrieva...

Effects of Disturbing News on Recall of Subsequently Presented News

Both male and female respondents were exposed to a television news program. Immediately following exposure to either an emotionally disturbing or an innocuous, affectively neutral news story, respondents watched a sequence of standard news items. The placement of these items was systematically varied through three time slots of 90 s each. In the two preexposure conditions, all items appeared equally often in all time slots, thus allowing comparisons over time as well as at given times. A surprise information-acquisition test was administered for the contents of the news items. Compared with the control condition, the acquisition of information from the news items following the emotionally charged, disturbing story was significantly poorer for a period of 3 min. No appreciable difference in information acquisition was observed thereafter. The apparent impairment of information acquisition, processing, storage, and retrieval after emotionally charged news stories is discussed in terms of emotion theory. Practical implications are considered.

Newshole Allocation Policies of American Daily Newspapers.

National survey of managing editors finds newshole not determined by advertising department, and 91% of M.E.s satisfied with policy of their paper.