The relationship between attentional inertia and recognition memory

Attentional inertia has been hypothesized to index engagement with a stimulus. In this study, the hypothesis that attentional inertia indicates increased cognitive processing of television is tested. College students\u27 visual attention to two hours of commercial TV was rated and following a one day delay, they were given a recognition test using a unique test tape constructed of 132 audiovisual units, half of which had been presented while the viewer was in the test room while the other half served as foils. While subjects were readily able to discriminate between units that had been presented and units that had not been presented, there was no relationship between time in progress when a unit was presented and recognition memory performance. Recognition memory performance overall was better than chance. These results suggested that testing was actually tapping auditory perceptual memory