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in fast and continuous pattern (about 200 words per minute) best attract viewers’
attention and receive best result in recall of information compared with blinking and fade out kind of pattern; as to layout there is no difference in viewers’ memory of information whether news crawl is on the bottom or the left side of the screen (Fan, 2008).
Although each factor seem important enough to impact on learning, it is worth noting that the interaction effect of certain factors is more likely to impact on viewers’
learning than a single factor alone, for the production of news stories today is way too fancy, viewers are not likely to encounter just one single factor that is capable to influence the viewing process (Lu, 2007). If that is that case, discussion of
redundancy of television news structural features or information overload would not even be an issue.
Viewing motivation. The uses and gratifications approach posits that people use
media outlets in order to satisfy certain needs and desires (Rubin, 1993). From this perspective, viewers’ choice of media, or preference for television programs, is influenced by a host of personality traits (Bagdasarov, Greene, Banerjee, Krcmar, Yanovitzky & Ruginyte, 2010). When applied to news programming, viewers are assumed to choose programs according to their preferences for specific programs or genres (Webster & Wakshlag, 1983), in consequence, gratifications sought from news
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viewing leads to recall of news information (Gantz, 1978).Therefore, underlying the uses and gratifications approach, individuals’ motivation and behavior must be
understood before explaining the effects of media use (Rubin, 1993). McQuail (1984) categorized the uses and gratifications approach to individual media use in four main parts, including (1) information (such as the need to seek relevant information) (Cacioppo, Petty & Kao, 1984); (2) personal identity (including finding support for personal values and finding models of behavior); (3) integration and social interaction (such as finding a sense of belongingness to others); and (4) entertainment (wanting to just relax or to avoid complicated problems).
In sum, activity or passivity of television viewing will influence individuals’
learning through television viewing (Wonneberger, Schoenbach & Meurs, 2009), and one learns best when actively seeking some particular information (Gantz, 1978). This active motivation impacts on subsequent learning and retention of news information for viewers, because how they select information to be encoded affects how much amount and duration of information is stored (Childers, Houston & Heckler, 1985). In later section of information processing, this will be further discussed.
Situational factors in television viewing. Process of socialization, lifestyle,
personal experience, knowledge and attitude are examples of situational factors which could affect an individual to learn through television news viewing (Lu, 2007). While‧ 國
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television messages--being a type of stimulus itself---tends to draw viewers’ attention, research had showed that viewers’ attention frequently varies between and within programs, individuals and situations (Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls & Potter, 2000). It all depends on the content and the situation each individual is engaged in at the current moment. Studies also show that people bring to the news viewing situation a cognitive switching style which they employ in a systematic manner regardless of variations in news content (Rimmer, 1984).
If information perceived through news is not what the viewer had intended to seek, for example, the viewer only wishes to seek international economic information but was bombarded with domestic and international information on entertainment and social news and nothing about economics, then even for a motivated television news viewer hoping to seek information, the inability to attend to the message desired would work against finding a recall effect (Kellermann, 1985). In other situations, viewers can predict what is coming on in television programs and adjust their
response accordingly. This is the anticipation effect suggested by Rimmer (1984), an expression of the predictable form of television news.
Other circumstances would be when an individual’s newly learned information conflict with one’s previous learned knowledge in the information learning process, causing interference in the process of memory. Kellermann (1985) proposed two types
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of interference in learning and retention of information, retroactive and proactive.
Retroactive interference refers to newly learned information interfering with the recall of old information; proactive interference refers to old messages interfering with the storage of incoming new messages. In other words, what an individual had previously known related to the message affects how one learns and remembers the message perceived now.
Viewers’ attitudes include believability in news content and the media system, or personal interest in certain news topics (Lu, 2007). Ashley, Poepsel & Willis (2010) suggest that corporate media systems controlling and financing media outlets may be one of the many reasons to affect viewers’ believability in news content. Browne (1978) noted that nature of the interviewer or interviewee in news programs (e.g., laypersons serve as examples of the public opinion and sometimes eyewitnesses or victims which adds credibility to the interview) (Vettehen, Nuijten & Peeters, 2008) is also likely to influence how much viewers believe in the news story, as a result, affect viewers’ learning of news content (Drew & Reeves, 1980).
Individuals’ perceptions of the newscaster’s motivation may also determine the effect of learning. Since news could serve both entertainment and information functions (Lu, 2007), perhaps those who think news story that serves to provide information might learn more from it than those who consider it is partly to entertain,
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because the former is consistent with the learning process (Drew & Reeves, 1980).
Overall, the process of learning through television news viewing may be affected by many complicated factors, individually and news content structurally speaking. In many situations, interaction among these factors is also likely to bring different results to viewers’ learning process (Lu, 2007). However, aside from the factors discussed, how does the process of learning really work? What are the essential elements that must be present for process of learning to work smoothly? How are the factors discussed previously in any way influencing process of learning?
Information Processing
In the previous section, questions were raised on how process of learning works and the factors that are likely to influence this process. Cognitive psychology scholars did many researches on human’s learning process, and declared the information processing theory in the sixties (Lu, 2007). The information processing approach to human development emphasizes the fundamental mental processes involved in attention, perception, memory, decision making, and reasoning (Rosnov & Roberts, 2005). This part of the thesis will look deeper into the occurrence of information processing, and the factors that are likely to impact either negatively or positively on information processing during television news viewing.
The idea of information processing lies in the very heart of cognitive psychology,
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in which the human mind is compared to the structure of a computer (Mcleod, 2008).
The basic idea of this hypothesis stated that the human mind has the sensory register (such as the eyes, ears and mouth) with equivalent function as the input device of a computer to take in stimuli (White, 1986). Similar to the central processing unit of a computer, the human mind process incoming stimuli and hold information
temporarily in short-term memory (or working memory) to be used, discarded or transferred into long-term memory to be stored for an indefinite of time (Radvansky
& Copeland, 2006). The output of information process is then exhibited through viewer’s behaviors or actions (Hedge, 2011). Evidently, memory plays a significant role within the process of information and is influential to viewers’ subsequent behaviors (Lu, 2007). In light of the main focus of this thesis, which is to investigate viewers’ memory performance under the impact of number of news crawls and the relevance between news crawls and the main news content, moreover, viewers’
information seeking need, it is important to understand the structures and process of memory before further discussing factors that are likely to influence memory performance.
Memory structures. Memory does not copy reality at storage nor perfectly
reproduce it whenever it is needed, rather, memory is a “constructive” process influenced by our current knowledge (Lucariello, 2004). Our brains tend to keep our‧ 國
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memories in nodes, which it then connects with associated other memories. Nodes can be semantic (with straight forward meanings) or affective (with emotional meaning) (Teichert & Schöntag, 2010). This is the most commonly accepted model of memory, the associative network model (Mitchell, 1982). Under the associative network model, Lang (2000) described that memories are conceptualized as being linked to other related memories in an association, and when one end of the memory is activated, the whole association will be activated, a process which supply related memories more active and available than unrelated memories (Klimesch, 1994). When more and more related new information are linked to the already existing associative memory
network, the more complete information storage is developed, the stronger memory becomes of an individual, and the easier retrieval it will be (Lang, 2000).
From the cognitive psychology point of view, memory and comprehension are defined differently (Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., Roskos-Ewoldsen, D., Yang, Choi &
Crawford, 2003). Memory relates with information storage, retrieval, and accessibility, whereas comprehension refers to the interaction of newly received and already
existing information, in consequence, having impact on one’s explanation and description of the newly learned information (Roskos-Ewoldsen, B. et al., 2003).
Evidently memory and comprehension compliment each other, and learning is just the process of the interaction between memory and comprehension (Collins, 1970).
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Cognitive psychology researchers concluded that the memory structure is
composed of the sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory (Lang, 2000). The sensory register is referred to the human senses such as the eyes, mouth and nose, to receive external stimuli or information. It has an unlimited capacity storage of incoming information, however, if not eventually transferred into
short-term memory, it will disappear in only few seconds, meaning the information will not even be processed by the individual (Lang, 2000). Short-term memory, literally speaking, has a limited capacity of storage of 5 to 9 items at one time (Lu, 2007). Information stored in short-term memory will not be further transferred into long-term memory if not processed or rehearsed by human in less than a minute (Lu, 2007). Long-term memory, however, is believed to have an unlimited capacity of storage of information, where information stored here is reckoned to be permanent and meaningful (Hedge, 2011). However, there are times when an individual cannot or has trouble to recall information stored in long term memory due to disturbance or lack of retrieval cues (Hedge, 2011). This finding brings the focus of this thesis into a more clear view in which question must be asked, what are the factors contained in a television news story that are more likely to help viewers remember the news content, or adversely, causing viewers to reject incoming information or simply doesn’t wish to remember?
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Memory process. It is assumed that the human brain can, and usually does,
engage in encoding, storage and retrieval simultaneously (Lang, 2000). Lang
explained the basic sub-processes of information processing are to perceive or expose to stimuli, select incoming stimuli and turn them into mental representations
(encoding), do mental work on those representations and transfer short-term
subsystem to long-term subsystem (storage), finally, reproduce them in the same or an altered form (retrieval) (Lang, 2000; Kellermann, 1985).