Pace and Continuity of Television Programs: Effects on Children's Attention and Comprehension

Children's tv programs can be distinguished by the processing demands of their format and the pace with which changes occur. High-continuity programs are stories requiring temporal integration of successive scenes for full comprehension. Low-continuity programs are in "magazine" format: Successive bits are independent of one another, and temporal integration across bits is not required for comprehension. Pace is denned as rate of scene and character change in stones and rate of bit change in magazine shows. Sixteen children's tv programs varying in continuity (high vs. low), pace (high vs low), and animation (cartoon vs. live production) were made from broadcast material. Each lasted 15 minutes. Children (N = 160), half in grades K-l and half in grades 3-4, viewed two of the programs and were then tested for recall. The recall task required sequential senation of still photos taken from the program. Older children attended longer and reconstructed sequences better than younger children. High-continuity (story) programs led to greater attention and better recall than low-continuity (magazine) programs. Low-paced shows were recalled better than high-paced shows. Older children recalled best when shown either low pace or story format or both. Young children showed additive increments in recall due to low pace and high continuity: Either alone was better than none, and both was better than either alone. Younger children attended somewhat more to highthan to low-paced shows if they were in magazine format, a weak effect of perceptual salience. Older children attended to high-continuity programs in synchrony with their pace: longer looks to low-paced and shorter looks to high-paced programs. This effect was attributed to schematic and strategic processing by older children when the format justified it. Regression analyses indicated higher correlations between attention and recall for animated stories than for other types of programs, an effect attributed to their relatively high stereotypy in the medium. Age, continuity, and pace effects on recall were not fully accounted for by their effects on attention. Results were interpreted as indicating evidence for development of active, schematic processing of television by children and for strategic attending by older children, based on perceived processing demands.