Redefining Media Content and Structure in Terms of Available Resources

Abstract

This study reconceptualizes redundancy, complexity, and emotion in terms of cognitive load (specifically as resources allocated and required), then measures the combined real-time impact of these variables on available resources and encoding over the course of an hour television news program. Operational definitions of redundancy in the literature were ordered by their theoretically predicted level of resources required, then coded overtime. Dynamic measures of audio and video complexity in terms of resources allocated and required were developed and tested. Over the course of the news program, all combinations of independent variables occurred and the theoretically derived combinations of cognitive load successfully predicted changes in resources available as measured by Secondary Task Reaction Times (STRTs) and encoding indexed by recognition. The results suggest that defining message variables in terms of dynamic changes in cognitive load can allow us to predict the simultaneous dynamic impact of multiple message variables which contribute to complexity on processing capacity and message processing.