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and just a general idea of the news story (Bernard and Coldevin, 1985), as previously brought up in information learning and television viewing.
Storage. In light of what was discussed earlier about how message would be
stored according to the individual’s prior knowledge and experience, in the storage process, the more new information is related to one’s already learned knowledge, the more comprehensive new information will be learned and remembered (Lang, 2000).
Retrieval. Lang (2000) stated that the more linkage there is between retrieval cues
and information wished to be retrieved by the individual, the more effective it is for the process of retrieval. Situational factors also account for affective information retrieval. Proactive and retroactive interference are two circumstances where an individual is likely to be confused of new information with prior or later received information, causing new information to be forgotten and unable to be retrieved (Eakin & Smith, 2012).
Information Complexity and Overload
The limited capacity model was brought up by Lang (2000) in her compiled study of relative information processing studies of the past thirty years. This theory mainly proposed that human is a natural information processor, however, one’s ability to digest information is limited (Lang, 2000). In other words, when the system storage is up to its limit, one resource must be let go in order to take in a new one, otherwise it is
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likely to lead to dysfunctional memory (Lang, 2000). Like previously discussed, many factors are likely to influence encoding, storage and retrieval, but the most important thing is whether the individual has enough resources to allocate to each sub-process to accomplish a thorough process of information. Two main factors thus are likely to contribute to inadequate information processing, in which the individual chooses not to allocate resources to process the information, or the individual simply has not enough resources to allocate to each sub-process (Lang, 2000). If apply the two factors on the focus of number of news crawls and relevance between news crawls and main news content on viewers’ memory performance, can viewers’ inadequate recall of news content be the result of the viewer’s personal preference for not choosing to process certain information, or that one is unable to process all
information at once due to excess information provided by news crawls? In this part of the thesis, discussion will focus on information complexity and overload of television news content and its impact on viewers’ recall of news information.
Complexity, as defined by the number of independent units in a stimulus, can lift arousal by increasing the cognitive demands that are necessary to assess the
information (Schwartz, 2003). In television news, complexity can be referred to productions techniques such as new crawls (Wei, 2005) and structural features such as number of cuts, edits, pace (Grabe, Zhou, Lang & Bolls, 2000; Lang, Bolls, Potter &
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Kawahara, 1999), camera movements and graphics in the news content (Lang, Bolls, Kawahara, 1996). Television, of course, is a complex stimulus (Moskalenko & Heine, 2003), and indeed, complex stimulus are able to induce arousal (Berlyne, 1960), so do many television producers believe. The problem is, there is always an optimal level of arousal for each viewer (Berlyne, 1960). Too much or too little arousal would cause an adverse effect, which when applied to television news viewing, too much
complexity in news content, viewers too would suffer from inadequate information processing including attention, comprehension and memory (Lee & Lang, 2009; Lang, Park, Sanders-Jackson, Wilson & Zheng, 2007). In fact, the amount of information processing resource required is directly related to the degree of complexity of the television image (Rimmer, 1984; Schwartz, 2003).
Media studies researcher at University of Nevada Las Vegas, Paul Traudt, once commented on information saturation and stated that “viewers are comfortable with a crowded screen if the elements are all related to the same topic. However, incongruent and multiple elements like the weather conditions, stock ticker, sports scores and headlines unrelated to the main topic, can result in information overload” (Potter, 2002). In other words, inserting unrelated information that adds more new details to the news story is also likely to cause the task of processing messages to be more difficult for viewers (Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls, & Potter, 2000).
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In sum, information overload is a good example of complexity, and they are two side of a story. In television news viewing per se, structural features, production techniques, sound, and image, all serve the purpose of providing information for viewers. In addition, visual elements like news crawls have been claimed to take up an enormous amount of effort to process (Potter, 2002). Needless to say, if all these information shown before viewers are incongruent and unrelated to the same topic, it is likely to exceed one’s storage capacity and result in information overload (Lang, 2000; Bradley, 2007). An overload anywhere in information processing is likely to obstruct memory for the semantic whole (Bradley, 2007).
Literature review found on the relationship between use of news crawls and viewers’ information processing is scarce. Furthermore, there is little empirical and theoretical support for predictions about the directions of the effects asked in this thesis. Thus, this study deals primarily with four hypotheses and two research questions as follow:
H1: The number of news crawls will negatively affect viewers’ attention to the news clip, including both the news crawls and the main news content
H2: Relevance between news crawl content and main news content will positively affect viewers’ attention to the news clip, including both the news crawls and the main news content
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H3: The number of news crawls will negatively affect viewers’ recall of news information, including both the news crawls and the main news content
H4: Relevance between news crawl content and main news content will positively affect viewers’ recall of news information, including both the news crawls and the main news content
RQ1: Will the effect of number of news crawls on viewers' recall, including the main news and the news crawls, depend on the relevance between the news crawls and the main news?
RQ2: Will the number of news crawls and the relevance between the news crawls and main news affect viewers’ information seeking need?
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Method
The data of this thesis was collected with an experiment embedded in an online survey questionnaire. The purpose of drawing on the experimental approach was to manipulate external independent variables, including number of news crawls and relevance between news crawl content and main news content, to examine the changes in dependent variables, including viewers’ attention, recall, and information seeking need.
While other qualitative methods such as in-depth interview or field study can also apply to understanding the effects discussed in this thesis, these methods are not that suitable for establishing causality compared to the experimental method, and might increase errors in the results due to too many unexpected external interferences such as space, time or subjects which could not be easily manipulated. The goal of this thesis is to determine the causal relationship between the variables, and the experimental approach offers a more promising way to estimate the causal effects accurately (Arceneaux, 2010). In addition, the experimental method ensures internal validity and, thus, endows this thesis more confidence in making assertions about the influence of its manipulations.
Participants
Participants (N=145) were recruited from National Chengchi University through
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the campus-wide online survey system. Out of the 145 participants, 78% were female and 22% were male. Mean age was 20.5. An online questionnaire was designed to test participants’ attention to news crawl content and main news content; recall of news information including content of main news and news crawls; information seeking need; media viewing habits; and personal basic information. Participants arrive at the designated computer lab and were randomly assigned to each of the four conditions, which emphasized different features of the news crawls. Participants went directly into watching the news clip and then were asked to fill out the online questionnaire in order to finish the experiment. A $50NT voucher was given to each participant as a reward of completing the experiment. The data collection began on December 24, 2012 and ended on December 26, 2012.