John C. Wright

Words from "Sesame Street": Learning vocabulary while viewing.

The study is a longitudinal investigation of preschool childrens viewing of Sesame Street and their vocabulary development.

The Development of Reflection-Impulsivity and Cognitive Efficiency

An alternative model of reflection-impulsivity is presented, consisting of a style dimension and an efficiency dimension, along with a methodological alternative to the traditional dependence on raw e

Young Children's Perceptions of Television Reality: Determinants and Developmental Differences.

Five- and 7-year-old children judged factuality and social realism of favorite TV shows and test clips in pairs matched for content. In each pair one was news or documentary format, the other fictional drama. All children understood that fictional programs were not factual. Children correctly discriminated the purposes and intended audience of news from those of documentaries. Children discriminated factuality by genre of program, and genre of program by formal production features and by content. Age and vocabulary scores (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised; PPVT-R) predicted accuracy of factuality judgments, but TV viewing history over the past 2 years did not. By contrast, judged social realism was predicted by viewing history and very little by age and PPVT-R. Older children better understood that fictional characters do not retain their roles in real life and that fictional shows are scripted and rehearsed

The Development of Selective Attention: From Perceptual Exploration to Logical Search

Publisher Summary There is a major developmental shift in the nature of the stimulus variables that control attending behavior. This shift is proposed as an important contributor to the development of systematic information processing in children. This chapter proposes a distinction between exploration and search as distinctive modes of information-getting behavior. These two patterns are discriminable in their own right in terms of measurable response properties; they are further discriminable in terms of the stimulus and task features that control them; and they are observed to have a different course of development and period of acquisition. It is argued that exploration is a simpler process that develops earlier than search, it is maintained by different types of motivation, and it provides the germinal perceptual experiences out of which logical, systematic search can evolve when the appropriate cognitive structures for its organization become available. Parallel with the developmental evolution of exploratory schemas into search routines, the evidence reviewed suggests a shift from the control of attention by salient features of stimuli toward its control by logical features of the task and a shift from passively tracked to actively sequenced attending.

Children's recall of television material: Effects of presentation mode and adult labeling.

Children from preschool, kindergarten, and Grades 3 and 4 viewed an edited prosocial cartoon in one of four viewing conditions that changed program features and introduced viewing information to aid subjects in recognizing and structuring central plot information. Childrens recall of central and incidental program content was assessed. Older children recalled more total information; participants who had viewed with an adult experimenter recalled more material than did children in other viewing conditions. Visual presentation enhanced central recall.

When celebrities talk, children listen: An experimental analysis of children's responses to TV ads with celebrity endorsement

Abstract Two studies tested the effects of TV ads with celebrity endorsement on the product preference and understanding of 8- to 14-year-old boys. Study 1 compared two ads for a model racer. One had celebrity endorsement (by a famous race driver) and footage of real automobile racing featuring the celebrity (live action); the second had neither feature. Study 2 employed one ad for a different brand of model racer edited to generate a 2 (endorser presence) by 2 (inclusion of live racetrack action) factorial design. A total of 415 boys were exposed to one of the experimental ads or a control ad, embedded in a new animated childrens adventure program. Preference for the advertised brand of model racer (pre- and postviewing) and a number of cognitive variables were assessed. Exposure to endorsement led to increased preference for the toy and belief that the celebrity was expert about the toy. Live action led to exaggerated estimates of the physical properties of the toy and the belief that the ad was not staged. The 8- to 10-year-olds associated the glamour of the endorser with the toy and were more reliant on his advice than were 11- to 14-year-olds. However, the two age groups were not differentially affected by the ads. Contrary to the speculation of many researchers, understanding about advertising intent and techniques and cynicism about ads had almost no influence on product preference after viewing.

Form cues and content difficulty as determinants of children's cognitive processing of televised educational messages

An experiment was designed to assess the effects of formal production features and content difficulty on childrens processing of televised messages about nutrition. Messages with identical content (the same script and visual shot sequence) were made in two forms: child program forms (animated film, second-person address, and character voice narration with sprightly music) and adult program forms (live photography, third-person address, and adult male narration with sedate background music). For each form, messages were made at three levels of content difficulty. Easier versions were longer, more redundant, and used simpler language; difficult versions presented information more quickly with less redundancy and more abstract language. Regardless of form or difficulty level, each set of bits presented the same basic information. Kindergarten children (N = 120) were assigned to view three different bits of the same form type and difficulty embedded in a miniprogram. Visual attention to child forms was significantly greater than to adult forms; free and cued recall scores were also higher for child than for adult forms. Although all recall and recognition scores were best for easy versions and worst for difficult versions, attention showed only minor variation as a function of content difficulty. Results are interpreted to indicate that formal production features, independently of content, influence the effort and level of processing that children use to understand televised educational messages.

Children's auditory and visual processing of narrated and nonnarrated television programming.

Two experiments with 5- and 7-year-old children tested the hypotheses that auditory attention is used to (a) monitor a TV program for important visual content, and (b) semantically process program information through language to enhance comprehension and visual attention. A direct measure of auditory attention was the latency of the childs restoration of gradually degraded sound quality. Restoration of auditory clarity did not vary as a function of looking. Restoration of visual clarity was faster when looking than when not looking. Restoration was faster for visual than auditory degrades, but audiovisual degrades were restored most rapidly of all, suggesting that dual modality presentation maximizes childrens attention. Narration enhanced visual attention and comprehension including comprehension of visually presented material. Auditory comprehension did not depend on looking, suggesting that children can semantically process verbal content without looking at the TV. Auditory attention did not differ with the presence or absence of narration, but did predict auditory comprehension best while visual attention predicted visual comprehension best. In the absence of narration, auditory attention predicted visual comprehension, suggesting its monitoring function. Visual attention indexed overall interest and appeared to be most critical for comprehension in the absence of narration.

Nutritional misinformation of children: A developmental and experimental analysis of the effects of televised food commercials☆

This study assessed the accuracy of judgments of 100 school age children as to the presence of real fruit content in 3 sets of cereals and beverages advertised on TV: real fruit, nonfruit, and artificially fruit flavored products. In the baseline session, accuracy was an increasing function of age, but children at each age were deceived about real fruit content of artificial fruit products. In session 2, the experimental group saw TV ads for 6 products embedded in a program (naturalistic viewing). They then judged fruit content for these six advertised products, plus a matched set of six for which ads were not shown. Controls saw toy ads on TV, and then judged the same 12 products. In session 3, subjects in each group saw the same ads they had seen in Session 2, without the program and with instruction to attend very carefully to messages in the ad (intensive viewing). They then judged all 12 products again. After naturalistic viewing, few significant differential changes from baseline were found. But after intensive viewing, accuracy of judgment of advertised artificial fruit products was lower than baseline among experimental group children. By contrast, accuracy was higher than baseline both for control childrens judgements of “advertised” prod-

Television and the Informational and Educational Needs of Children

The Childrens Television Act of 1990 requires broad-casters to air programming that meets the informational and educational needs of children. Despite a massive amount of evidence that educational programming has positive effects on the social, intellectual, and educational development of young children, and recent evidence that such viewing experience during the preschool years fosters both increased school readiness for kindergarten and superior high school grades in English, science, and math, there is still a large number of teachers and parents who believe that television viewing in general is harmful to children. Evidence to the contrary is reviewed, and the conditions under which the medium has a positive effect on childrens educational progress are examined. A heavy diet of commercial, broadcast, entertainment television made for general audiences does indeed have some of the alleged harmful effects, but educational programming for children between the ages of 2 and 5 years has the opposite effects.