Brief Reports Children's Recall of Television Material: Effects of Presentation Mode and Adult Labeling

Children from preschool, kindergarten, and Grades 3 and 4 viewed an edited prosocial cartoon in one of four viewing conditions that changed program features and introduced viewing information to aid subjects in recognizing and structuring central plot information. Children's recall of central and incidental program content was assessed. Older children recalled more total information; participants who had viewed with an adult experimenter re-called more material than did children in other viewing conditions. Visual presentation enhanced central recall. Television presents visual and verbal mes-sages in a linear stream, imposing its own struc-ture on them and thereby making comprehension difficult for the young viewer. Children have difficulty in recognizing and differentiating cen-tral from incidental material (Newcomb & Col-lins, 1979), in relating antecedents to conse-quences (Collins, 1973), and in preserving the temporal nature of the presentation (Leifer etal., 1971). Television's structure and form are in part responsible for problems in abstracting and pro-cessing important and meaningful content. For example, central content is often presented ver-bally, whereas much of what is visually salient is also incidental to the main plot message. Moreover, when children do attend to verbal material they often find it abstract and lacking in concrete cues that facilitate processing or recall. The speed and linearity of presentation may interfere with such effective processing skills as pausing, verbal labeling, or rehearsal, shown to improve integration and recall of tele-The research for this article was conducted under the auspices of the Center for Research on th