Doris Graber, 1990 Seeing is Remembering

Learning from Television

Seeing Is Remembering: How Visuals Contribute to Learning from Television News

by Doris A. Graber

In some respects, the age of television has turned back the clock of human learning to an earlier age when most learning was based on what the eye could observe directly. Television makes it possible to see events happen, immediately or after some delay, rather than having to rely only on verbal descriptions. Since print news, even using still pictures and graphics, can never completely capture the actual happening, one might expect people in the television age to have a better grasp on reality, including the political world, than ever before. Apparently, this expectation has not been fulfilled. Most current research indicates disappointing levels of learning about politics for most Americans, despite the ample pictorial content of television news (28).

Four explanations for the puzzle will be explored in this article. The first one, to which a number of scholars have alluded, concerns how visual information is presented: Information may be lost because its manner of presentation makes it difficult to absorb. A second possibility, for which little research evidence has been presented thus far, is that visuals contain too little information to produce substantial knowledge gains. A third possibility is that the problem lies with the audience, which for a variety of reasons may ignore much of the

The visual elements of television news have not received a great deal of attention in the past, for both theoretical and methodological reasons. It has been argued that examination of visuals is not worthwhile either because they merely reiterate points already made by the words or because they convey purely idiosyncratic meanings. Even when research evidence has debunked this theory on both scores, there still remains the major obstacle of coding visual content (1, 10, 11, 13, 22). The average news broadcast presents a large number of complex pictures with many potentially significant details. Coding them all is an overwhelming task made more complex by the fact that these pictures are filmed to record motion and therefore are constantly changing. Camera angles change, as does camera distance. Photographic techniques like zoom shots, fade-ins and fade-outs, and dissolves present varied images to the eye. However, content analysts can now master such complexity by gestalt coding, as described later.

Doris A. Graber is Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago Copyright 0 1990 Journal of Communicarion 40(3), Summer. 0021-9916/90/$0.0+.05

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visual information presented to it. The information may be difficult to process because the audience has been conditioned to concentrate on the verbal information; or the audience may use visuals merely as cues to retrieve pictures already stored in memory. Finally, it is possible that audiences do learn a great deal from the pictures but that the information gain has not been measured appropriately. Because television news in the United States has taken its basic structure from print news, most researchers regard and treat the text as the primary carrier of information and structure measures of information recall accordingly. Visuals are judged primarily by what they contribute to the verbal text, not by what they may contribute independently.

To assess the manner of presentation of television news and the information contained in audiovisuals, we analyzed a series of television news stories with spedal attention to the nature and contributions of the visual aspects of the broadcast. Two sets of newscasts were involved. The first set (from which the tables below are drawn) consists of all political stories from the early evening national news videotaped during the first two weeks of February 1985: 61 stories on ABC, 46 on CBS, 42 on NBC, and 40 on PBS (MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour), for a total of 189. To guard against the danger that the week chosen might be atypical, we also randomly selected 150 national and local news stories from the early and late evening broadcasts for analysis. These were taped over four months from January to April 1985.

For each news story, two coders recorded routine information, such as network, date, anchors and reporters names, and story length. They also recorded each news storys main topic, as stated in the introduction, and identified the verbal themes presented in the story, identifylng a total of 394 separate verbal themes. Because the opening theme is highly significant, we coded how it was treated audiovisually and what kind of spin it created for the story.

We also recorded all visual scenes, classifymg them according to their main focus. A scene was identified as a shot or shots of the same subject, bounded by adjacent scenes of different subjects. A new scene meant cutting to a com-

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pletely new subject, not merely motion within a scene, or a pan shot, or a change in focus through zooming or changing angles. The recorded focus of each scene could be people, animals, inanimate objects, locations, or views of graphics or text. Coders further classified visual scenes into close, medium- length, or distant shots and identified or unidentified subjects, depending on whether the verbal text identified the people and scenes. These distinctions were made because audiences are likely to pay more attention to close-ups and identified elements.

Using a gestalt coding approach, we then assessed what kinds of information, emotions, and perspectives the visuals contributed to the story. Gestalt coding is grounded in research on information processing that has demon- strated that television viewers do not see, hear, and interpret each cue separately. Instead, they concentrate on the meanings conveyed by audiovisual messages. Like listeners to the spoken word, they first discern a story's general gestalt or theme. Usually, gestalt identification is easy because viewers are verbally guided, particularly by the story's verbal lead-in, to the overall meaning and significance of the message elements that they are about to witness. For instance, a man running along a city street can be verbally identified as an escaping felon, a marathon runner, or a pet owner chasing his dog. Depending on the gestalt, the audience will search subsequent scenes for appropriate cues.

The decisions required for extracting meaning from visual and verbal themes are neither complex nor idiosyncratic. Audiovisual television news language works largely through stereotypical verbal and visual discourse that is designed to be easily understood, because the story must quickly convey shared meanings to vast, diverse audiences. There is no time to ponder hidden meanings or even delicate shadings of information. Tests in which audiences are asked about the general, rather than idiosyncratic, meaning of television news stories reveal that shared meanings are indeed captured (1).

Gestalt coding mimics the steps that are typical for information processing. It starts with identification of the kinds of information that most people within a given cultural setting normally use as cues to discern the intended meanings of a news story. In ascertaining this meaning, coders consider the context of each story within the total newscast, the manner of introducing and sequencing stories, and the meanings conveyed by sounds other than words. Other contextual factors include the physical setting of the story, its historical context, and major contemporaneous news developments. To ensure coding accuracy in making gestalt coding evaluations, we routinely used two coders to cover the same material. Intercoder reliability coefficients were in the .80 range. Discrepancies between the two coders were resolved by a third coder who also checked ten percent of the uncontested coding decisions.

Our news analysis revealed that the way television news stories are presented does, indeed, militate against learning. Most television news stories are quite short, which makes it difficult for them to convey much information. There is little time for providing either context or explanation. In one

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Table I : Percent of news stories by average length of visual scenes

Time

ABC CBS NBC PBS All (n = 599) (n = 688) (n = 589) (n = 128) (n = 2002) % % % % %

1-10 seconds 37 46 59 8 38 11-20 seconds 31 28 27 32 29 2 1-30 seconds 13 17 5 47 20 More than 30 seconds 19 9 10 13 13

week of television news output, 33 percent of all stories were covered in less than one minute; 79 percent took less than three minutes.

Table 1 shows average exposure times when the length of each network news story is divided by the number of scenes depicted in it. When low-video PBS is excluded, three out of every four stories shown by the major networks have visual scenes that appear on the screen for less than twenty seconds, on average. This is hardly enough time to absorb the visual information fully, considering that scenes follow each other in rapid succession with no breaks to permit reflection. Only 13 percent of stories display visual scenes that average more than thirty seconds. Although the length of exposure of individual scenes varies within stories, brevity is the prevailing mode.

Information absorption is further complicated by the fact that viewers are simultaneously bombarded with verbal information that often is only partially redundant with the pictorial information. Leaving aside the issue of whether visual and verbal processing can be done simultaneously or whether viewers must alternate between brief snatches of verbal and visual processing, slighting one or the other, the task of coping with such a rapid-fire visual and verbal barrage is formidable. In fact, the need to attend to both pictures and words may interfere with comprehension because it distracts viewers from the verbal messages that provide the frame for interpreting information (8, 18).

Table 2 shows that, depending on the network (except for PBS), between one-third and one-half of all the stories are heavily illustrated, carrying more than ten visual scenes. This forces viewers to try to absorb a tremendous amount of complex pictorial information. Given the extremely rapid rate at which the information is presented, information losses become inevitable. The PBS broadcast, which relies primarily on interviews conducted in television stu- dios, may be more conducive to learning because its information is less densely packed. The figures in Table 2 are conservative because our measure- ment criterion was tilted toward underestimation, with a "new" scene requiring a cut to a completely different visual setting, not merely motion or a change in focus within a particular scene.

The pictures on television news contain ample information, but this information does not supply the kind of factual learning that sodal sd- entists usually measure. As Table 3 shows, when pictures were classified according to their primary focus, close-ups of people were the most prevalent

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Table 2: Percent of news stories by number of vlsual scenes

ABC CBS NBC PBS All Number (n = 61) (n = 46) (n = 42) (n = 40) (n = 189) of scenes % % % % % 1 12 35 32 35 27 2-4 28 0 7 40 19 5-10 23 I1 5 23 16 11-20 28 22 29 3 21 21-54 10 33 27 0 17

type of illustration. Excluding pictures of reporters, an average of 70 percent of the stories carried close-ups of identified persons that displayed features suffi- ciently clearly to permit viewers to make personality judgments. In fact, in half the stories, close-ups of identified persons constituted one-quarter or more of all visuals shown. Overall, of the 2,002 visual scenes contained in the 189 news stories, one-third (665) focused on close-ups of identified people. None of the other types of visuals came close to these figures.

The emphasis on close-ups of people is not surprising, considering that, in order to keep its hold on the audience, American TV news adopts a set of con- ventions that serve to involve the viewer emotionally (15, p. 215). People pictures are best for that, including ample footage of public figures and of private individuals, used as symbols of the average citizen who is affected by events and public policies. They also include ample footage of reporters and anchors, building a relationship of trust that enhances the newscasters credibility and influence.

Close-ups of human beings are rich information sources because people draw a multitude of inferences from human physical appearance and movements (26, 30, 32). Facial close-ups readily reveal mental states, such as pain, happiness, sadness, curiosity, doubt, fear, and embarrassment (7). Many people infer personality characteristics from human physical features. Tall, thin people with glasses are considered brainy; fat, short people are deemed jolly (4) . Looking another person straight in the eye denotes honesty to most observers, while avoiding eye contact is deemed a sign of lack of candor. Body cues, including movements, postures, and grooming, may readily disclose a persons

Table 3: Percent of news stories by prevalence of plcture types

ABC CBS NBC PBS All (n = 61) (n = 46) (n = 42) (n = 40) (n = 189)

Picture types % % % % %

Identified person close-up 82 70 68 55 70 Unidentified person close-up 38 48 44 15 37 Reporter on camera 72 76 85 100 82 Identifiable location 57 57 54 20 48 Identified object close-up 20 17 24 5 17

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age, physical well-being, poise and vigor, wealth or poverty, and conformity or nonconformity to current social norms. In fact, about 40 percent of information about others may be communicated through body movements rather than words (19). But this kind of information usually does not enlighten people about complex social and political problems on a par with the type of information that is conveyed verbally in typical news stories.

Far fewer scenes focus on close-ups of locations that clearly reveal the characteristics of the terrain or structures, or close-ups of objects or animals that provide clear images of their appearance and functioning. Unlike close-ups of people, pictures of identified objects and locations do not readily elicit rich inferences and emotions. In fact, they tend to capture attention only when the objects or locations are unusual or are rarely seen. If the televised scenes or objects are familiar, as many of them are, people routinely ignore them. Televi- sion visuals of objects and places generally become important information sources only on the comparatively limited number of occasions when they depict previously unknown situations for which audiences have no pre-existing mental pictures and which would be difficult to imagine. The astronauts walk on the moon, the Queen of England entering the House of Lords, and the war- time burning of Vietnamese villages are examples (16, 31).

The types of scenes used for television stories are notable for their rou- the, stereotypical approaches. Familiar visuals as well as stylized picture scenarios abound, making it easy for viewers to comprehend the message and to relate it to similar information previously stored in memory. Not unexpect- edly, news producers reliance on conventional visuals means that most visuals provide comparatively little new information about the political world (33). Comparisons of the various versions of stories produced by the networks when covering similar types of events reveal a striking similarity of imagery.

For example, during the period under investigation, the pope, whose picture and entourage have become widely known, visited various Latin American countries, giving rise to a series of stories about his trip. In each case, the broadcast opened with a formal photograph of the pontiff and a symbol indicat- ing the country he was visiting. Occasionally, nondescript scenes of his airport arrival were shown, usually including a view of his plane and a scene of him kissing the ground. Then followed nearly identical scenes of the pope deliver- ing sermons to huge crowds of cheering people. The danger of antipapal vio- lence was indicated by scenes of the pope in his armored car or scenes of soldiers or armed police on guard. Overall, these scenes were so bereft of new visual information that would complement the verbal messages that there was little point in watching them more than once.

Components of stories were as stereotypical as story sequences. For instance, stories about political negotiations generally depicted the inside or outside of the building where the negotiations were taking place. They rarely showed the sites that were the subjects of the negotiations. The senselessness or cruelty of violent action was routinely depicted by showing children as victims. Public officials were generally pictured against a symbolic backdrop, such as the White

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Table 4: Percent of news storles by prlmary contrlbutlon of visuals to verbal themes

ABC CBS NBC PBS All (n = 61) (n = 46) (n = 42) (n = 40) (n = 189)

Contribution % % % % % Irrelevant information 21 33 41 40 32 Redundant information 30 15 10 15 19 New information 34 24 41 10 29

Clarification 3 13 5 5 6 People or object identification 10 2 0 30 10

Emotional components 2 13 2 0 4

House for the president, the Capitol for members of Congress, or the Supreme Court building or Department of Justice for court decisions. Many stories indicated their authenticity by showing pictures of reporters at the scene of the event. When stories of crimes included pictures, they generally depicted the harm done to victims, such as a battered, bandaged victim in a hospital bed or removal of a murder victims draped body from the scene of the crime. Pictures of suspects or the environment in which they lived were rarely shown.

Our examination of the visual content of television news thus confirms that the substance of pictures, the nature of picture sequences, and the manner of presentation all militate against transmitting the gist of typical television news stories through the pictures-if one assumes that the verbal message represents the gist and that the inferences drawn from close-ups of people are unimpor- tant. To test this conclusion explicitly, we asked our television news coders, during the initial coding of videotapes, to evaluate the primary contribution of the visuals as a whole to the verbal themes contained in the story.

As Table 4 shows, in more than half of the stories the pictorial information failed to enhance the verbal story line-it either added nothing at all to the thrust of the words, or it merely repeated information already supplied verbally. Still, in 49 percent of the stories, the visual scenes did enhance what was said. Of these, visuals contributed new information that directly expanded the substance of the verbally provided information in 29 percent of the stories. In 10 percent, visuals helped by identifying unfamiliar people and places, and in 6 percent visuals enhanced the clarity of the verbal story. In a mere 4 percent of the stories, the visuals added further emotional content relevant to the verbal themes.

Would television news audiences reach simLlar conclusions when asked about the contributions of pictures? Would they, too, use the standards of verbal learning as the yardstick for gauging the importance of visuals? Would their ability to process picture information be hampered because of the substance of the pictures and the manner of presentation?

To answer these questions, we conducted an experiment with 48 adults, evenly split between men and women, and ranging in age from early twenties to middle sixties. Pretest interviews indicated that all respondents, irrespective

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of whether they were regular or sporadic viewers, claimed to be interested in the news, either out of general curiosity or for professional or personal reasons. Nobody claimed to watch for the sake of enjoyment, and only eight people expressed unqualified satisfaction with television news. Dissatisfaction was greatest among the most frequent watchers, whose disillusionment obviously did not deter their viewing.

The group was selected, in part, to provide a best-case scenario for learning from television news. Half were academics teaching social sciences, especially political or media-related subjects, in a large urban university. They were selected randomly from a pool of 282 names on the telephone rosters of relevant departments. Prospective participants who expressed no interest in watching television news were eliminated. We assumed that our group of academics would be acutely interested in politics and exceptionally familiar with political topics, so that high levels of attention to news, news comprehension, and learning from news could be anticipated.

One-quarter of the participants were college students, selected randomly from among students entering a classroom building that houses the universitys social science classes. Presumably, these students were intellectually curious and alert but not likely to be well versed in the daily vagaries of political news. The remaining participants were people whose employment in assorted blue- collar, white-collar, and professional jobs did not suggest uncommonly high concern with politics or unusual facility with processing political news. They were recruited from a roster of names compiled by soliciting nominations from the other participants in the experiment. The group as a whole thus repre- sented above-average intellectual skills and interests in news, along with a lib- eral sprinkling of average news viewers.

We had expected the greatest information retention and learning from the college professors, followed by students, and the least gain from the non-aca- demic group. The underlying assumption was that information retention and gain would be enhanced by expertise in learning,* so that the experts would extract the most information even though much of the news would be redundant for them. The facts proved otherwise. There were high and low gainers in all three groups. High or low scores showed little relation to the subject matter. People seemed to possess or lack a capacity for retaining and learning from television news irrespective of the nature of the stories or their interest in a particular topic.

Every participant was exposed to twelve news stories in a laboratory setting, six with visuals and six others with sound only. Segments with and without visuals were alternated. Each person was assigned to one of two demographi- cally matched groups. The A group viewed odd-numbered stories and listened to even-numbered ones; the B group did the reverse. The procedure permitted us to observe how the two groups would vary in their reactions to a story when

One of the most consistent findings in TV news comprehension research is that TV news viewers with high levels ofknowledge comprehend and recall the news significantly better than those viewers who have lesser levels of knowledge (28, p. 143).

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one group had seen it with visuals and the other without. Stories had been paired according to six major themes so that each person could see the same theme with or without visuals. This enabled us to compare the visuals-plus- sound and sound-only responses to the same basic theme. As we shall see, visuals made a difference that was apparent in the group comparisons as well as in individuals patterns of information processing.

We selected stories typical for the medium; similar scenarios, with different actors in different locales, appear routinely on the nightly news. Two of the stories dealt with international trouble spots of particular concern to Americans. One involved the issue of sending U.S. weapons to antigovernment guerrillas in Nicaragua; the other concerned problems arising from conflict in the Middle East between Israel and various factions fighting in Lebanon. A second pair of stories dealt with the issue of poverty and persecution of large population groups. One story had a North American setting, involving the issue of sanctuary in the United States for displaced Latin Americans; its counterpart, viewed through the prism of a papal visit, involved the fate of people trapped in the cycle of poverty in Latin America. A third pair of stories exemplified the heartthrob genre-hard-working, upright, ordinary citizens, caught in the throes of major misfortune by forces largely beyond their control. The victims in these stories were family farmers in the Midwest about to lose their farms and black students losing their chance for a decent life after dropping out of high school.

A fourth pair of stories involved science topics. One discussed a newly developed pill that can safely induce abortion two months after conception; the other dealt with the presence of cancer-producing chemicals in various indus- trial establishments. Another pair of stories covered comparatively dry economic news. One story dealt with the declining inflation rate, illustrated by drops in the price of gasoline and heating fuel; the other covered the proposed federal budget for 1986 and emphasized the major areas of increases and decreases. The final pair of stories dealt with two politically tinged entertainment items. One story reviewed the newly instituted television coverage of the British House of Lords as an entertaining spectacle as well as a move to build public support for retaining the chamber. The other story covered a goodwill trip to Europe by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to display its musical skills and, in the process, lure visitors and traders to the Windy City.

Immediately following exposure to each story, each person was asked: If a friend walked in right now and asked you to tell him/her what this story was all about, how would you report it? This question is based on the assumption that people generally talk freely and honestly with friends, so that the recapitulation will be comparatively ample. It also will cover the kinds of elements that people consider important and of interest to peers. The initial question was followed by several probes-Anything else?-intended to tap additional story elements that the individual had consciously or inadvertently withheld initially.

When the story was shown with visuals, the participants were asked, in addition: Do you recall any of the pictures in this story? Which ones? What did they show? Did they make the story more meaningful? In what way? Respon- dents were also asked about special meanings the story might have for them,

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so that the influence of this special relation might be assessed. Their responses indicated that we had selected items to which large numbers of the participants could relate very well. The range was from 44 percent of the group finding a story about the Israeli pullout from Lebanon personally relevant to 83 percent who could personally relate to a story about high-school dropouts. All the responses were tape-recorded.

To score recall and comprehension of the audiovisual messages in each story, we identified individual verbal and visual themes. Verbal themes were defined as ideas conveyed by a single statement or cluster of statements. For example, in the story about the abortion pill, the following description of the pill was considered as a single theme, even though four sentences are involved:

Anchor: The abortion is induced by taking a pill up to two months after conception. We have this report @om France.

Reporter: In size, shape, and color, it S identical to an aspirin. Its taken in pill form for four days, starting two days before menstruation is due to start.

Coded in this manner, the 12 stories contained a total of 214 verbal themes. Visual themes were defined similarly as graphics or film scenes conveying

messages about a particular topic. In the abortion story, for example, the verbal statement that experiments on laboratory animals produced a very high suc- cess rate with mice and rabbits was illustrated with five scenes of animals. As recorded in our picture protocols, these consisted of (a) rubber-gloved woman and man in lab coats, stroking belly of brown rabbit, apparently looking for injection site; (b) hand placing mouse into mouse cage with multiple white mice; (c) close-up of white mouse held by tail, hands visible, white lab coat in background; (d) baby chick behind cage bars; (e) pan shot of cages showing adult chickens. There were 135 visual themes. We grouped verbal statements and visual scenes into themes, rather than analyzing them separately, because that simulates what audiences do when they process information (13, 33).

Individual stories in the experiment contained from 10 to 26 verbal themes, with one-third using 10 to 15 themes, one-third using 16 to 20 themes, and one-third using 21 to 26 themes. There was no relation between the length of stories-which ranged from 1% to 3% minutes-and the number of major themes they contained. The average was 18 verbal themes per story. The numbers are an indication of the amount of information made available to the audience and the possibilities for learning. Themes vary, of course, in their importance and attractiveness for the audience, so that one would not expect all of them to be equally well remembered. We found, however, that few themes were totally ignored by all audience members.

The numbers of visual themes ranged from 7 to 19 per story, well below the average number of verbal themes. Science and economy stories tended to have the fewest, except when the presentation included graphics. Unlike verbal themes, the number of visual themes did vary with the length of the story. The

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four longest stories included an average of 14 visual themes, the middle-length group averaged 12, and the four shortest stories averaged 9.j

The verbal and visual themes included in each news story were not very readily retrieved from memory, even though the cards were stacked in favor of producing high recall. As mentioned, all panelists were interested in television news, and three-fourths of the group were professional scholars or college students. Moreover, recall was tested immediately after the panelists had been exposed to a single story containing an average of 18 verbal and 11 visual themes to which they had given their undivided attention and about which they expected to be quizzed. Numerous prompts provided respondents with an opportunity to go beyond their initial answers.

To examine how much of the audiovisual information in news stories can be recalled immediately after exposure, we computed recall rates for all verbal and visual themes in each story. Recall rates were low if no more than 25 percent of the respondents spontaneously recalled a theme, medium if 26 to 50 percent of the respondents mentioned the theme spontaneously, and high if more than half of the respondents spontaneously mentioned it.

Table 5 displays the percentage of verbal and visual themes in each story that elicited low, medium, or high recall. It shows, for example, that in the economic story about the budget, in which there were nearly equal numbers of visual and verbal themes, three out of four respondents failed to recall ten of the verbal themes (48 percent). Recall was medium for another nine verbal themes (43 percent), which were remembered by up to half the audience. Only two themes produced high recall, being mentioned respectively by 30 and 31 respondents. These themes dealt with a sharp increase in the defense budget and a dramatic slash in the budget for housing and urban development.

The themes that were not mentioned by the majority included information about the procedures through which the budget is publicized, comparisons with budget allocations in prior years, announcements of a series of minor cuts for various departments, and mention of a five percent pay cut for federal work- ers. A projected deficit of $178 billion, characterized as a lot of red ink, also elicited low recall. The slighted items were as significant as the well-remembered ones. But audiences had been more sensitized by previous media coverage of defense expenditures and were therefore more likely to note that theme as well as the contrasting slash in social expenditures (17).

Of the 19 visual themes in the budget story, nine (47 percent) produced low recall. One, a typed, scrolled list of names of cabinet departments whose bud- gets were to be frozen, was missed by every viewer. Recall was medium for another six (32 percent) visual themes and high for four (21 percent). The most memorable themes were three attractive emblems symbolizing cabinet-

In line with the concept that pictures are less important than words, picture information is more readily sacrificed on the altar of time savings than verbal information. This becomes particularly clear when one compares versions of the same story on different broadcasts either by the same station or by competing stations. For example, stories first broadcast in the earlyevening are often pared through picture reduction when they are aired on a later broadcast.

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Table 5: level of recall of verbal and vlsual themes (In percentages)

Verbal themes Visual themes Low Mod. High Low Mod. High

Story n % % % n % % %

Fights in Central America 12 58 33 8 7 14 29 57 Fights in Middle East 18 67 22 I 1 I 1 27 45 27 Social policy-sanctuary 10 40 30 30 8 37 37 26 Social policy-Pope in LA 21 62 14 24 18 39 28 33 Heartthrob-pupils 14 36 43 21 I 1 18 36 45 Heartthrob-farmers 26 73 23 4 17 53 35 12 Science-abortion pill 17 41 35 24 8 38 25 38 Science-chemical poison 22 55 23 23 8 38 13 50 Economy-inflation 18 44 33 22 8 13 38 50 Economy-budget 21 48 43 10 19 47 32 21 Shows-Lords on TV 20 55 40 5 I1 36 18 45

Low recall = 0-25 percent of respondents spontaneously mention; moderate recall = 26- 50 percent of respondents spontaneously mention; high recall = 51-100 percent of respondents spontaneously mention.

Shows-ChicagoSymphony 15 33 40 26 9 22 33 44

level departments and displaying arrows to indicate the size and direction of budgetary changes, along with a shot of President Reagan. Interestingly, though more than half of the viewers recalled seeing the president, hardly any- one recalled the gist of his brief remarks.

For all but the story on budget proposals, the most widely recalled verbal themes were either the anchors statements or the opening statements by the reporter. In each case, these statements were verbal summaries of the main story idea, fleshed out by subsequent statements. Comments by our respondents made it clear that they concentrated on capsule summaries as the quick- est and easiest way to capture a storys meaning. They gave only limited attention to the rest of the story, citing as reasons a lack of deep interest and a desire to escape the processing burdens imposed by the manner of news presentation. This is typical information-processing behavior, of course. To avoid information overloads, people extract only a limited number of basic themes from news presented to them and discard the rest (13). The best strategy for extracting the bare bones of essential news with a minimum of effort, in most cases, is to attend to the anchors or reporters initial statement.

Visual themes proved to be more memorable than verbal ones. Overall, 70 to 95 percent of the verbal themes in each story failed to capture the attention of at least half the respondents, who did not mention them during open- ended questioning. Out of a total of 214 verbal themes, only 34 (16 percent) were spontaneously recalled by more than half the respondents. That is a very high rate of information loss. Visual themes were far more memorable, with 46 out of 135 (34 percent) recalled by more than half the respondents.

One might argue that this is an unfair comparison because the average story contains substantially more verbal than visual themes, decreasing the chances that a given theme will be selected. But that misses the main point, which is

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that much more of the visual information contained in news stories reaches the audience. A greater portion of the verbal information is waste, in part because it represents an overload of information that cannot be processed in the available time and in part because the audience is not interested. Most people also find it easier to process television visuals than verbal information. A group of masked refugees or President Reagans smiling face is easily noted and remembered, because the mass of visual detail can be absorbed at a mere glance. Words, by contrast, must be processed sequentially and often represent complex, abstract information (26). If memorability and learning are, indeed, linked, ease of processing becomes a significant learning factor. Our research suggests that visual themes are remembered and learned more readily than verbal themes (6; 23; 26, p. 387; 34).

More than half of our respondents recalled three types of visuals, making them potentially valuable for increasing comprehension and information gain. The first group, close-ups of very familiar people such as presidents or popes, were almost always noted. A second type that rarely escaped notice involved close-ups of unfamiliar people in exotic circumstances. Examples were the masked refugees, who were recalled by every respondent, and scenes of Latin American or Middle Eastern people that showed how people live in foreign cultures. The third category, somewhat less memorable, involved close-up views of unfamiliar people who became noteworthy to the audience because it could hear them express their views. The common denominator in these patterns of memorability is the depiction of human beings.

Largely unmentioned were stereotypical pictures providing factual information that further clarified the verbal statements. Examples are pictures of farms that illustrate the areas most affected by the farm crisis or pictures of chemical plants designated as polluters. Similarly, viewers generally failed to recall so- called establishing shots that indicate where action is taking place, such as a picture of the Supreme Court building when its decisions are discussed. Nor did they recall distant shots of various activities, including friendly and hostile crowd actions, and they paid only slight attention to vistas of scenes well known from everyday life, such as domestic animals, customers buying gasoline, or scientists handling test tubes.

These patterns of viewing indicate that the greatest information gains come from unusual sights and from pictures of people that provide audiences with information about the characteristics of the figures on the screen and enable these audiences to develop reactions to the pictured individuals. But this type of information rarely advances the story line directly. Audiences generally fail to process information that is not personalized and that is neither very familiar nor very unusual. Much of the information that could advance the story line is contained in this middle range.

Are low levels of learning from television news due at least in part to schematic processing of verbal and visual information? Research on information processing indicates that people form schemata-commonsense

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Table 6: Percent of respondents (n = 24) who add lnlormatlon to or misrepresent pictures and text

Storv

Saw verbal only Add Err Add Err % % 70 %

Saw visual and verbal

Fights in Central America Fights in Middle East Social policy-sanctuary Social policy-Pope in LA Heartthrob-pupils Heartthrob-farmers Science-abortion pill Science-chemical poison Economy-inflation Econom y-budget Shows-Lords on TV Shows-Chicago Symphony

39 36 32 30 35 32 35 16 17 20 28 26

44 24 28 52 17 32 52 40 52 44 20 22

24 30 13 9 4 4 4 4 4 9 5 16

16 17 22 14 17 17 20 13 21 30 14 24

models of their world-that permit them to cope with the flood of new current information by comparing it to the schema. If the new information appears to be similar to the model, it does not have to be processed afresh. The model is retained and the new information largely ignored (9). Do people actually use schematic processing so that the themes presented in news stories are used primarily as triggers to stored memories and produce little new learning? Does better recall for visual themes indicate that they are less subject to schematic processing?

Table 6 provides answers to these questions. It records two very powerful cues to schematic processing: the presentation of extraneous information, and high rates of errors in reporting. Social psychological research indicates that, when people embellish the verbal and visual facts they have just heard and seen in a news story with verbal and visual facts that are absent from the story, the extraneous information tends to come from schemata stored in memory (18). However, because schematic processing does not invariably produce embellishments, the embellishment test understates the actual rate of schematic processing. Error rates also provide evidence of schematic processing. When people process information directly, rather than using it as cues for schema retrieval, they make fewer errors because the actual data are used in place of their counterparts drawn from memory.

The criteria we used for labeling information provided by respondents as additions to the story were stringent. Two coders compared the information reported in the interview transcripts with detailed records of the verbal and visual information contained in the broadcasts. Information that could be deemed a misconstruction of the information presented in the story was labeled an error; errors were common. More than half of the respondents made serious mistakes, for example, when reporting an economic story, a sci-

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ence story, or a story about social policy. Overall, errors outpaced additions in the recall of both visual and verbal themes. Considering the stringency of our criteria, it is likely that some misstatements scored as errors were actually additions. Accordingly, Table 6 may understate the actual rate of borrowing from pre-existing schemata. To avoid comparing groups of unequal size, in Table 6 we report verbal errors and additions only for the 24 respondents who did not see particular visuals, rather than for all 48 respondents.

Table 6 supports the inference that people do, indeed, process news stories schematically. Every story stimulated at least some additions and errors when its themes were reported. However, visual information apparently is treated schematically to a lesser extent than verbal information. Fewer than half of the participants (44 percent) originated visual additions, compared to three-quar- ters (75 percent) who originated verbal additions. On average, 12 percent of the respondents made additions to each storys visual themes, compared to 28 percent who added to the verbal themes. Similarly, on average, 19 percent made errors when reporting visual themes, compared to 36 percent who erred when recalling verbal themes. Visuals enhanced overall accuracy: Recall of verbal statements was more error-free for eight out of twelve stories when they were viewed with visuals. Put differently, without visuals, 77 percent of the respondents misreported verbal themes; with visuals, this figure dropped to 67 percent. When reporting visual themes only, 58 percent of the respondents made errors.

Although other factors may be involved as well, the findings suggest that news consumers pay closer attention to the text whenever visual data are also available. Schematic processing thus appears to be a factor in faulty recall, but it plagues visual learning less than verbal learning. Again, while the comparison between errors made in reporting visual and verbal themes must be judged in light of the fact that there were more verbal than visual themes in each story, it is important to know that the larger amounts of verbal information led to more errors, rather than greater clarification of the elements of the story.

There are several plausible explanations for the lesser prevalence of schematic processing for visuals. One can theorize that there is more actual processing of visual stimuli because people have more conlidence in their ability to decipher visual information and often find visual stimuli more interesting and appealing than verbal texts. Visual informations greater richness of detail also makes it far more dBcult to schematize than verbal information. Visuals are therefore more likely to be processed afresh and recalled accurately. Alterna- tively, one can theorize that people concentrate on verbal processing because they regard the text as the chief information source. Visual cues are noted tem- porarily, but only modest efforts are made to schematize them. Hence fewer visual schemata are available for later recall. The fact that adult viewers have been socialized to concentrate on verbal information at the expense of visuals provides support for this view. So does the fact that people ofcen listen to television news, ignoring the pictures (8). However, this also may be an indication that schemata have been developed for many visuals, so that people watch only what they have not previously seen.

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Table 7: Actual and potentlal contrlbutlons of vlsuals (In percentage of responses)

Contribution Adds reality Adds clarification Adds emotion Adds nothing Adds information Misses potential Detracts Helps memory Adds interest Duplicates schema Depends on picture

Actual Potential (n = 263) (n = 263) % % 34 16 13 13 I 1 5 4 3 0 0 0

19 14 6 18 9 3 6 5

1 1 8 1

What contributions to story comprehension and to information gain did the respondents themselves attribute to the visuals? Table 7 presents two types of responses (with dont know responses omitted). The first column contains the chief evaluation given when people were asked, immediately after viewing each of six stories, what the visuals had contributed to it; this is their actual appraisal. The second column presents answers when the respondents had heard each of six stories without visuals and were asked what pictures might have contributed; those answers are labeled potential. They reveal peoples expectations-they could have shown much better pictures- and judgments about visuals. These appraisals may affect their eagerness to extract meanings from visual themes. They also shed light on the extent to which people consider visuals redundant with their schemata, as indicated by the comment: Ive seen more than enough pictures of that. I know what it looks like. Table 7 presents the responses in the aggregate; Table 8 presents them separately for each story.

Compared to the assessments presented in Table 4, which judged the contribution of visuals to the verbal themes, the responses in Tables 7 and 8, when visuals are assessed in their own right, are quite different. People who have just viewed a story and who judge the visuals without explicit references to the verbal text are most impressed by the fact that visuals make stories more realistic. Fully a third (34 percent) of the judgments made by respondents immediately after viewing stressed this element. This emphasis is further evidence that people do watch visual information, rather than relying mostly on their schemata. Just under a fifth of responses made by people who had not seen the visuals suggested that visuals would have enhanced realism. When judgments are made using verbal content as the yardstick, as reported in Table 4, the element of realism does not surface at all.

Our respondents believed that the visuals allowed them to form more com- plete and accurate impressions of people and events. They could see, for example, how physically debilitated a group of refugees looked, and they could

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Table 8: Percent of positive, neutral, and negative appraisals of actual and potential contributions of visuals to lndlvlduai stories

Potential (n = 263) Actual (n = 263) Posi- Nega- Posi- Nega- tive Neutral tive tive Neutral tive % % % % % %

Fights in Central America 78 17 4 50 35 15 Fights in Middle East 74 9 17 58 28 14 Social policy-sanctuary 79 17 4 50 46 4 Social policy-Pope in LA 96 4 0 82 9 9 Heartthrob-pupils 92 8 0 74 26 0 Heartthrob-farmers 95 0 5 63 29 8 Science-abortion pill 54 23 23 27 55 18 Science-chemical poison 45 30 25 48 39 13 Economy-inflation 63 29 8 66 29 5 Economy-budget 77 0 23 63 23 14 Shows-Lords on TV 94 6 0 96 0 4 Shows-Chicago Symphony 90 5 5 81 14 5

Positive includes "adds reality," "adds clarification," "adds emotion," "adds information," "helps memory," and "adds interest." Neutfd includes "adds nothing." "duplicates schema," and "depends on picture." Negative includes "misses potential" and "detracts."

determine the vintage of weapons used by Central American soldiers when this crucial information was not available from the text. They could judge the enthusiasm of crowds surrounding the pontiff or the mayor of Chicago in terms of their own sense of what constitutes high or moderate enthusiasm. And they could compare the new visual images of battle scenes in the Middle East or President Reagan's style in addressing farmers with images stored in memory. These memories could enable them to judge the similarity of these situations to prior events and to assess changes in the appearance of public figures that might attest to their health and vigor. Such valuable knowledge has generally been ignored in assessing learning because it does not add directly to the textual inf~rmation.~

The second most common contribution mentioned by respondents who had viewed visuals was the fact that they clarify the story. They make it easier to assess the scope of a disaster, judge living conditions in a prison cell, or tell who is speaking in a group. Among those discussing the potential contribution of visuals, this reason ranked third, and it ranked low for judgments made on a purely verbal basis. Interestingly, few of the scenes that clarified the various stories were actually mentioned by viewers during story recapitulation. This suggests that viewers may actually use these scenes but forget that they did. Just as people extract meanings from words and then promptly forget them, so they may extract meanings from visuals without storing them for later retrieval.

In fact, the "reality" displayed on television may be false, "a dramatic pseudo-reality created from an ongoing flow of happenings 'out there' but transformed into an entertaining story that conforms to the logic of the medium while assisting people to relate those events to their everyday lives" (24 , p. 16). Picture choice and framing thus may distort facts or mislead to inaccurate interpretations.

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Next in importance, viewers listed the emotional impact of visuals. Consider- ing the frequent use of close-ups of human beings, many of them showing faces in larger-than-life detail, this emphasis is understandable. What is puz- zling, however, is that it ranks far lower-in seventh place-in the contributions of visuals anticipated by nonviewers. One possible explanation is that people who do not see the visuals adopt a more verbal perspective. As Table 4 shows, from that perspective emotional information is minimal.

Another interesting finding evident from Table 7 is that supplying additional information is not ranked as a major contribution of visuals (in fifth place for viewers as well as nonviewers). Our respondents made this judgment using the common assumption that the verbal text presents the gist of the news. Addi- tion means supplementing the verbal story. They thus concurred with the observation that visuals enhance the textual information only moderately. Table 7 also shows that viewers did not find that visuals made the news more interesting, whereas 11 percent of the nonviewers, in accord with many television analysts, claimed that visuals enhanced interest. The fact that visuals are or might be a memory aid also surfaced only rarely.

of the viewers responses indicated that visuals detracted from the story; this figure rose to six percent in judgments by nonviewers. A limited number of responses indicated that visuals fell short of their potential or that the potential contribution of a visual very much hinges on its nature.

Thirteen percent of viewers responses indicated (without giving reasons) that visuals added nothing to the story, compared to 18 percent of nonviewers responses. A n additional eight percent of responses indicated that visuals dupli- cate what viewers already know. Given that most television pictures are highly stereotypical and that descriptions by nonviewers of what the pictures probably showed tended to be highly accurate, those giving this response were probably right. In fact, the availability of schemata may explain why 18 percent of nonviewers responses and 13 percent of viewers responses suggested that visuals made no contribution.

Negative judgments about visuals were comparatively rare. Only four percent

There was little unanimity about whether visuals for a given story were helpful, useless, or harmful and what the predse nature of the benefits or disadvantages might be in each case. As Table 8 shows, the visuals for the story on Latin Americas poor, the entertainment-related stories about the House of Lords and the Chicago Symphony, and the two heartthrob stories were rated most highly by viewers (favorably rated in 90 percent or more of the appraisals). These stories were particularly rich in facial close-ups, and several depicted colorful foreign settings. As is common for such human interest stories, the subject matter was better suited to visual than to verbal expression, and the audience reacted accordingly.

fact, the story about chemical pollution received more neutral and negative comments than positive ones, and neutral and negative comments about the abortion story made up nearly half of the comments. Viewers complained most

The two science stories and the inflation story earned the fewest plaudits. In

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about a lack of visuals that would clarify the scientific aspects of these stories. Nonviewers judgments were similar though not identical, with high marks for human interest and entertainment stories and low marks for science stories and economic news.

The discrepancies shown in Tables 7 and 8 between judgments based on actual viewing and judgments based on conjecture are intriguing, particularly in light of the fact that conjecture took place only minutes after visuals had been viewed, albeit covering a different subject. These picture sequences should have been powerful reminders about picture potential. Overall, those who saw the visuals had more positive perceptions of their usefulness than those who did not. For nine out of twelve stories, actual benefits were appraised more highly than anticipated ones. Such discrepancies may spring from the fact that people rarely think about the contributions made by the visual aspects of television. They do not have ready answers available to questions, and their conjectures therefore represent quick and tentative attempts at value judgments. If this is the case, it is not surprising that widely publicized stereotypes about the low quality of television news visuals should color these snap judgments.

The communications literature confirms what our viewers told us, namely that pictures make information transmission more rapid, realistic, and accurate than is possible in purelyverbal messages (3, 5 , 21, 27). Visuals also forge emotional bonds between viewers and what they view. Printed or spoken messages excel in providing story background, context, and explanation; pictures make audiences care about an issue and the people involved in it (20). The realism presented by television pictures enhances the credibility of news reports (3). People gain a sense of witnessing an event when they see it presented in moving pictures. They trust what they see more than what they hear.

The contributions of visuals to story content obviously are modest if the verbal story is the standard, but this is not the case when visual information is considered on its own merits. Thus far our analysis has shown that learning from television news is, indeed, made more difficult by the rapidity of the presentation and the large number of scenes that must be processed. Substantively, most visuals contain comparatively little information that directly advances the story line. Pictures and picture sequences are stereotypical and hence familiar. Except for close-ups of people, which are rich sources of direct and inferred information, they contain little that is new or stimulates thought. The audience, conditioned to consider the verbal information as the essence of the story, focuses attention on the verbal lead-ins as accurate capsule accounts. Learning is also diminished because the audience uses schematic processing, which permits it to rely on previously processed images (although there is evidence that schematic processing is more common for text than for pictures).

However, despite serious transmission problems created by the current format of news presentation, and despite the stereotypical approaches to picture sequences, visuals do convey a great deal of information. The visual format

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makes this information accessible to most viewers because it overcomes hur- dles of literacy and verbal skills. We have already noted the many inferences that most viewers are able to draw from the face and body language revealed by the plentiful close-ups of people shown on television. These are invaluable in forming opinions about political leaders and are obviously important in elec- toral choices.

The large numbers of pictures of people focus viewers attention on the roles played by individual actors in politics. They enshrine the politics of personality at the expense of considering the influence of the broader political system and at the expense of dispassionate factual analysis. This may explain why Ameri- cans tend to view major political events and even personal fates as personal triumphs or disasters, rather than placing them in the broader context of the political system in which they occur.

Visual cues are also used to appraise the credibility of news personnel and the spokespersons they present to the public on television. If the spokespersons appear to be credible, the impact of their messages increases and can bring about measurable changes in public opinion ( 2 5 ) . The high credibility (and resulting influence) enjoyed by anchors, reporters, and many high-level officials is largely a function of their television images.

The impact of unusual sights has been mentioned. Normally, these are rare for mature viewers, although they abound for children whose visual experi- ences are more limited. However, there are times when unusual sights do have a crucial impact on public opinion. Bloody scenes of the Vietnam War evi- dently crystalized strong public opposition to continued U.S. involvement ( 2 , 14) . Other examples of powerful, opinion-shaping visuals are the parades of political actors who face trial by television during important hearings such as the Watergate and Irangate investigations; vistas of disease or disaster victims, which produce outpourings of help; and sights of brutality toward defenseless populations.

The vast majority of emotional scenes shown on television appeal to negative feelings, such as horror, fear, and sadness. By and large, television news, like television fiction drama, is no happy hour. The negative moods with which it infuses political news may account for the publics often negative feelings about the political world-the videomalaise that Robinson ( 2 9 ) has chroni- cled. This is partly counterbalanced, however, by the upbeat portraits that political masters of the medium, like Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy, are able to convey ( 1 2 ) .

Although the pictures shown to television audiences vastly expand knowledge of human aspects of stories and allow audiences to form more accurate mental pictures of the world, they fail on many other fronts. In addition to the many shortcomings already noted, much political information deals with complex concepts that defy quick visual illustration. For instance, without spending a great deal of time in unfolding a story, how can one visually portray that an alien is illegal, or that a government wants to prevent bloodshed through a preventive military maneuver, or that deficit spending harms the nations economy?

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Appraisals of the contributions made by television news must consider these limitations. But the limitations need to be put into perspective. The very substantial information gains attributable to visuals must be acknowledged. In fact, they may be more important to an individuals intellectual growth and understanding of the world than the verbally transmitted facts and figures. Just as it is inappropriate to disparage the verbal aspects of the news for deficiencies in conveying physical reality, so it is inappropriate to disparage visual scenes for deficiencies in conveying abstractions. The television age demands the consid- eration of all elements of news presentation, visual as well as verbal. It requires a reconsideration of print-age values that prize the abstractions conveyed through words and discount the realities and feelings conveyed through pictures. We cannot afford to ignore the major ways in which learning is shaped by the vistas gleaned by the human eye and the cognitions, emotions, and memories that these vistas produce.

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Documents

Doris Graber, 1990 Seeing is Remembering