Audience attention as an indicator of involvement in a communication event

Includes bibliographical references (pages 47-49)It has been suggested that when an individual perceives an\ud ambiguous stimuli, there is an active utilization of accompanying\ud stimuli which are searched to test for possible meanings. A similar\ud process has been suggested for the perception of the metaphor.\ud In this study, audience???s headturns away from a visual stimulus\ud (slides) were recorded and assumed to reflect a lack of involvement\ud or attention. The visual stimulus is accompanied by either a\ud metaphorical recorded audio message or a literal equivalent of the\ud message descriptive of the slides. A semantic differential was used\ud to measure arousal and correlate with the headturn measurement.\ud Neither the semantic differential nor the headturn instrument\ud yielded significant results but the correlations of the two\ud instruments was highly significant, suggesting a promising future\ud for the headturn instrument