CHILDREN'S ACTIVITY AND TELEVISION COMPREHENSIBILITY

Abstract

Children's attention to television, measured by visual attention and by self-reports, varied in this study depending on the comprehensibility of the content. Children's visual attention was lower when they viewed Sesame Street, Greek, and backwards language bits than with randomly edited or normal bits, but their visual attention did not discriminate between random and normal bits. However, self-reports of effort to comprehend showed that the oldest children found the random bits harder to understand than the normal bits. Because the older children's visual attention was equivalent for two types of bits that they reported were different in difficulty, the results suggest that comprehensibility may be of limited value in explaining older children's active television viewing, but also that studies explicitly tying together visual attention, effort, perceptions of a wide variety of program characteristics, and comprehension are in order.