Television, Attention and

Reactive and Active Theories of Attention

Jerome Singer's reactive theory of attention proposes that children's attention to television is largely controlled by nonmeaningful, formal features of television programming, such as sound effects and camera movement. According to Singer, children's attention to television is passive and involuntary, and comprehension flows automatically from attention. In contrast to the reactive theory of attention, Daniel Anderson and colleagues contend that children's visual attention to television is primarily driven by comprehension; that is, children judge the comprehensibility of content and then decide whether or not to pay attention.

To test the active and reactive theories of attention, researchers conducted an experiment where one group of children watched an episode of Sesame Street with toys available, while a second group watched the show without toys. In comparison to children who watched with toys, children in the no-toys group spent close to twice the amount of time visually oriented to the screen. However, there were no differences between the groups in terms of comprehension, suggesting that increased visual attention to television does not automatically result in increased comprehension.

In another study designed to test the active theory of attention, the comprehensibility of Sesame Street segments was manipulated by (1) replacing the original dialogue with a Greek translation, (2) replacing the original dialogue with backward speech, and (3) randomly rearranging scenes. A fourth condition consisted [Page 802]of unedited (normal) segments. Children spent the most time visually oriented to the normal segments while the backward dialogue received the least amount of attention. The fact that children's attention to Sesame Street varied across conditions, even though the visual formal features were the same, suggests that comprehensibility is indeed a factor in guiding children's visual attention to television.

Subsequent research directly compared the extent to which formal features and comprehensibility guide children's attention to television. In one experiment, health-related television segments were manipulated to create two formats (child and adult) and three levels of comprehensibility or difficulty. The child format presented the health information using animation, children's voices, and upbeat music whereas the adult format presented the same information using live photography, adult male voices, and subtle background music. Difficulty was manipulated by changing the editing pace, the amount of repetition, and linguistic complexity. The child format elicited significantly greater attention among kindergartners than the adult format. Children's attention to television did not vary as a function of segment difficulty. These results suggest that formal features play a more important role in driving children's attention to television than comprehensibility; however, some researchers have argued that children use formal features to judge the comprehensibility of television content.

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