April 28th, 2005
Scrolling Tickers and Too Many Graphics on TV News Don’t Work
File this one under yet another useless study that tells you things you can figure out on your own for free. This time, it involves your TV and the habit cable new channels got into post 9/11 of loading up the screen with weather, stocks, tickers, factoids, and so on. Come to think of it, they remind of of my own desktop. No wonder I can’t think!
From Kansas State University:
“We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don’t have it on the screen,” (journalism/mass comm. professor Tom) Grimes said. “Everything you see on the screen — the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast — are conflicting bits of information that don’t hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message.”
“For their research, Bergen, Grimes and Potter conducted a series of four experiments that examined people’s attention spans regarding complex and simple cognitive processes.”The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content,” Grimes said.” via Boing Boing
degustibus says:
Yes, ditto websites.
I seldom visit yr former partner’s technudge anymore because it loads slow and has too much busyness.
April 28th, 2005 at 8:30 pm
Scott says:
From the original Eurekalert story:
“…if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that.”
This is exactly what has been my experience: older people just can’t handle the stimuli. Not that their brains aren’t capable, they just haven’t been trained to do so as younger people have.
Besides the fact that I actually prefer to multitask (I’m a millennial), I also like the crawls (when I watch TV news, which is not often) because I am not always interested in the story they are talking about at the moment, and the crawls give me something else to focus on. The other benefit is that if I flip on the TV news for the purpose of getting the latest on a big story which isn’t the one they’re talking about on the program, I can usually get a snippet from the crawl.
I always think back to Back to the Future 2 when I think about this issue — remember the scene where the future Marty comes home and flips on like 20 stations at once? I imagine that one day my kids will be able to do that. It pisses me off that I know I probably won’t!
April 29th, 2005 at 8:28 am
Alice says:
I agree. I can watch TV, add postings to my blog while digitizing my old camcorder footage onto a DVD disc (monitored in a tiny picture in picture window on the TV) and still enjoy the entertainment. I can onmly imagine what kids today can do.
April 29th, 2005 at 9:58 am