The media and cognitive information processing

Theory and research in cognitive effects of the mass media

Psychology

One of the great questions is “How do we think?”

It involves the ‘mind-body’ duality

It relates to human ascendance and mastery

It presents us with a powerful tool for good or ill

• Psychologists have struggled with the question since the inception of the discipline

• One early group of psychologists tried to determine what goes on inside the mind– Methods of introspection– Freudianism

• Another group declared that only behavior that the researcher could see was an appropriate domain of research– Experimentation– Watson/Behaviorism

New emphasis on the ‘black box’

• Beginning in the late 1950s and accelerating through the 60s and 70s, a paradigm known as cognitive information processing developed– Rejected behaviorism’s rules limiting

acceptable study to observable behavior– However, tried to use more traditional

scientific methods to study what goes on inside people’s heads

Cognitive information processing

• An attempt to map the inner workings of the brain using carefully constructed experiments and scientific techniques

• Experimental studies– Memory studies– Physiological measures (more recent)– Brain imaging

• Case studies of people with mental disorders– Brain damage

Cognitive information processing

• Combination of three influences– Computers/information processing– Information theory– Cognitive psychology

• Dominant paradigm in current psychological theory and research

A number of recurrent findings

• Limited capacity

• Different kinds of memories – Visual– Auditory– Meaning (semantic)

• Ability to recall memories from childhood, etc. during brain surgery

• Brain damage in certain areas leads to short-term memory loss, etc.

Recurrent findings

• Automatic reactions to light, loud sound, etc.

• Ability to focus attention on certain things– Impact on memory

• Similar mistakes made in tasks

• Sources of confusion, distraction

• Forgetting

Major approaches

• Structures approach

• Process approach

• Schematic approach

Series of actions

• Perception– Sensory reaction– Human limitations/abilities

• Pattern matching– Comparison with stored information to identify

objects, words, etc.

Sensory limitations

• Wolfen

Pattern recognition

Pattern recognition

• Apocalypse Now

Dual processing

• Sound and visual information are encoded separately but simultaneously

• If they are mutually supportive memory is enhanced

• If they are contradictory or just unrelated, memory for the content may be reduced

• Rehearsal– Repetition– Elaborative rehearsal

• Encoding– Laying down a memory trace

• Primacy/recency• Trace strength (intensity)• Schematization

Schema

• Most CIP theorists argue that networks of concepts are maintained in memory

• These networks develop as the individual grows and gains experience, learns, etc.

• Each individual develops a unique set of schema

• Knowledge acquisition is guided by existing schema– What to pay attention to– What the new information is related to– What the object of attention “means”

• Action is guided by schema

• Retrieval– Matching current information with stored

information– Memory loss may be inability to find

information rather than actual decay– Ability to effectively match stored info and

new info crucial• Interpretation is the effectiveness of matching

– Must have appropriate and well-formed schema in memory to draw upon

Attention

• Attention is the allocation of processing effort

• Attention is crucial for moving information through the series of transformations necessary to remember and use information– Without attention, there will be no

consciousness or memory of experience, no response, no reasoning

Attention allocation

• Attention can be allocated either automatically or intentionally– Certain stimuli draw attention without

conscious intent on the part of the audience member

• Novelty, intensity, movement, danger

– Other stimuli draw attention based on interests, needs, etc. of the audience member

• Ranges from conscious control to relatively automatic

Automatic attention

– Other stimuli draw attention based on interests, needs, etc. of the audience member

• Ranges from conscious control to relatively automatic

– Most such attention allocation is based on personal relevance, likely impact on yourself or valued others, moral implications, emotionality or personal interest

Personal relevance

• Relation to your background, demographic characteristics, life history– For example, a story about Kentucky may

hold special interest for Kentuckians• Ratings for television shows are significantly higher

in towns they portray – Drew Carey in Chicago– Designing Women in Atlanta

– Fargo

Likely impact

• This is probably most clearly tied to news– National v. local

• Local news watchers often are interested in socially rather unimportant events

– Local sports

– Graduations

– Traffic accidents

– Weather

– News is supposed to provide information that allows the public to make wise democratic choices

• Its success is hotly debated

Moral implications

• When your values are implicated in a cop story, news, reality show, etc., you are more likely to attend to the content

Emotionality

• Portrayal of some emotional content draws fairly automatic attention, while other types are learned—we’ll address this later in the semester– “Fight or flight” emotions– Social emotions

Personal interest

• Nature v. nurture

• Personal experience generates unique schema that influence attention– May develop a taste for rap music or for

orchestral music– May gain a taste for science-fiction– Childhood experience may generate a

positive attitude toward books, reading, etc. and help the child learn to focus on plot, etc.

Personal interest

• Topical– Sports narratives v. romance v. horror

Personal background

• Attention is directed by existing knowledge and interests– Based on genetics and/or experience– Individual differences are probably more

heavily related to experience• Interests

– Personal needs/life stage– Generational experience

• New information is encoded more easily if a well-formed schema is available that relates to the new information—will tend to draw attention to new information that corresponds to existing knowledge– Likely source of much of the selectivity

(limited effects) findings

Schema

• The schema chosen to interpret the new information largely determine its meaning– People will interpret the same content in

different ways• Meaning is at least somewhat individual

• Through the socialization process, people learn similar schemas for topic domains

Schema

• When the audience member applies a schema unlike that of the producer to a text, she is often said to have ‘misinterpreted’ or ‘distorted’ the meaning of the text– If we look at it differently, it is simply a case of

meaning formation like any other

Long-term memory

• Once the information has been interpreted, it enters into long-term memory in the adjusted schema– The information may be retrieved in response

to new information in the working memory that is determined to be related to it

– The likelihood of being retrieved varies with• Recency of activation• Frequency of activation• Strength of memory trace• Related concepts in schema