What Holds Attention to Television? Strategic Inertia of Looks at Content Boundaries

Looks at television that cross content boundaries (both between and within programming) provide an opportunity to examine the causes of attentional inertia—that looks at television become very much more stable after the first few seconds. Previous research left unresolved whether this inertia is due to expectations or biologic processes (strategic vs. nonstrategic processes), and this study allows direct comparisons. The strength of the inertial relationship varied considerably for different kinds of program boundaries, and also for within-program boundaries, with the latter varying as well by the genre in which they were contained. Taken together, the results provided no evidence for nonstrategic, biological processes causing attentional inertia. Instead, sev-eral genre-specific explanations based on expectations and cognitive demands are proposed. The study of visual attention to television has centered on what causes atten-tion and what attention signals about underlying cognitive processes.Debate over the first has been structured primarily around an active/reactive dichot-omy: whether the viewer or the stimulus primarily controls attention (se