The Effects of Edits on Arousal, Attention, and Memory for Television Messages: When an Edit Is an Edit Can an Edit Be Too Much?

The literature on television effects frequently finds that, although television viewers report high levels of exposure to television, memory for what they have seen is very low (Gunter, 1987). Recent research is beginning to explain these findings by demonstrating that the relationships between exposure and attention, and between attention and memory are not simple, direct, or linear.

Many researchers and research traditions have built a convincing body of evidence that exposure does not determine attention (Biocca, 1988; Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986). Rather, exposure seems to be a necessary but not sufficient case for attention to occur. Viewers' needs, intentions, and goals play a large role in determining whether the viewer will pay more or less attention to a message (Gantz, 1978; Geiger & Newhagen, 1993; Gunter, 1987; Levy & Windahl, 1984; Petty, Cacioppo, & Schumann, 1983).

Research also shows that attention levels do not remain constant during viewing of a message; attention frequently varies both between and within programs, individuals, and situations. In particular, attention levels during viewing of a single message have been shown to fluctuate predictably as a function of a television message's structure and content (Lang, 1995; Reeves, Thorson, & Schleuder, 1985; Reeves & Thorson, 1986; Reeves, et al., 1985). This research has demonstrated fairly convincingly that exposure to a message is not a guarantee of attention. Even among "attentive viewers", attention level varies over the course of a viewing session.

Recent research suggests that a similar situation exists for the relationship between attention and memory. Early research often inferred attention by measuring memory - making the assumption that if viewers remembered something then they must have paid attention to it, and if they didn't remember something, it was because they hadn't paid attention to it (Grimes & Meadowcroft, 1995). However, it now appears that many types of television messages elicit quite high levels of "attention" and quite low levels of memory for the content of the message (Gunter, 1987; Thorson, Reeves, & Schleuder, 1985, 1986).

Using the limited capacity approach to television viewing to analyze the relationship between TV's form and content and viewers' attention to and memory for television messages, Lang and her colleagues have shown that many aspects of television can create states of high attention which result in poor memory for television messages (Lang, Bolls, Potter, & Kawahara, 1999; Lang, Newhagen, & Reeves, 1996).

A Limited Capacity Approach to Television Viewing

The limited capacity approach to television viewing (Lang, 1995; Lang & Basil, 1998; Lang, Bolls, Potter, & Kawahara, 1999; Lang, Newhagen, & Reeves, 1996) suggests that viewers' information processing resources are limited. In order to process television messages, television viewers must encode the information contained in the message, retrieve already stored information from long term memory in order to make sense of the incoming message, and store the new information in long term memory. This approach argues that three sub-processes of information processing-encoding, storage, and retrieval-occur continuously, simultaneously, and to some extent automatically while viewers watch television. The viewers' fixed capacity for limited processing resources are flexibly distributed across these three simultaneously occurring processes(1). The distribution of resources is determined both by automatic processes (triggered by content and structural features of the message) and by controlled processes (driven by viewer interests, needs, goals, and motivations).