Young Children's Attention to "Sesame Street"

Abstract

CHILD I DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47,806-811. This study analyzed 1-4-year-dld children's attention to television as a J function of age, sex, and the presence or absence of a number of relatively sionpie auditory and visual t characteristics of a TV prt^ram. Children's attention and attributes of the Sesame Street program were i rated and stored in a computer so that continuous information about the TV program could be related to J continuous information about attention. There was an increase with age in attention to the TV, and attention was elevated in the presence of some attributes and depressed in the presence of others. Many of the attribute eflFects interacted with age, but very few interacted with the sex of the child. While television viewing may have important beneficial as well as harmful effects on the behavior of preschool children (e.g.. Ball & Bogatz 1970; Friedrich & Stein 1973), there has been Httle research on the development of attention to television and the factors that influence it (Stevenson 1972). From parental questionnaires, Schramm, Lyle, and Parker (1961) reported that by age 2.8 years M)% of children regularly use TV, and Lyle and Hoffinan (1972) found that 76% of 3-year-olds were able to name their favorite program. By age 4, parents report that children spend about a third of their waking hours viewing TV (Friedrich & Stein 1973). With the exception of some informal and unpublished formative research done for the children's TV program Sesame Street (discussed by Lesser 1972), there have been no studies of the early development of television viewing based on actual observation of children, nor have there been any systematic attempts to analyze preferred TV programs to determine just what distinguishes these from other programs. Tlie present research contains the first formal descriptions of the development of visual attention to television based on direct observations of children. The study also provides a new methodology for examining the relationship of attention to variations in television content. Method