The effects of live, breaking, and emotional television news on viewers' attention and memory

This study was created to find the effects of television news stories presented “live,” as “breaking,” and consisting of emotional video on viewers' attention and memory. Using the limited capacity model of information processing (Lang, 2000), the belief is that humans have a limited amount of mental resources available to process information. Two experiments were executed with the belief that information is processed differently when news story presentation was “live” or “breaking” and when video that evoked fear and disgust accompanied the stories.; The first experiment was executed in a laboratory setting, and the second took place in a simulated home-viewing environment. The results showed presentation appeared to play an important role in allocation of mental resources. Live and breaking news do get viewers' attention. However, whether information is subsequently encoded into memory might be guided by the emotional visuals contained in the messages. Attention to disgust stories was greater than attention to fear stories, yet this finding did not translate into increased memory. Results showed memory for disgust stories was less than memory for fear stories.; Understanding how people cognitively process information is key to understanding if and how they learn from television. Practitioners may be able to use the results to present the news differently so that it will be better remembered and thus people can learn from it. Also, there is limited research on live and breaking news. Therefore, this study increases the scholarship in an area of television news that has grown exponentially in recent years.