How Attention Partitions Itself During Simultaneous Message Presentations

Abstract

Television producers, across all types of programming, assume young viewers can parallel process simultaneously presented messages. For instance, television news producers appear to believe that young viewers can attend to weather icons, lexical news crawls, and sports scores while they also attend to news anchors who present the news. Nonetheless, attention theory suggests parallel processing on this scale cannot be executed efficiently. Given the format's popularity, perhaps those messages take advantage of perceptual grouping, as described by Treismam, Kahneman, and Burkell (1983). Perceptual grouping describes a process where separate but semantically related messages are attended to simultaneously with minimal effort. Using secondary task methodology, use measured participants' attentional capacity while they whatched an example of this format: CNN's Headline News. In addition to this visually complex condition, we created a visually simple condition by deleting graphics and news crawls. Participants in this latter condition attended to both the auditory and visual channels, thus retaining story facts conveyed by both channels. Participants in the complex condition, however, shifted attention to the auditory channel. Ten percent of the factual information contained in news stories was lost to participants. It appears that this multimessage format exceeded viewers attentional capacity. In conclusion, we discuss the implications for attention theory.