Memory and Recognition

Dunno why, but I find this fascinating -- a study of how well people of different ages recognize faces from either contemporary or historical figures. Younger subjects did better recognizing contemporary famous people, older subjects did better with "dated" famous people. No real surprise. What I find fascinating is how young adults better recalled "young" versus "old" familiar faces, and younger adults performed better than older ones when it came to "young" unfamiliar faces.

What's it all mean? As we get older, prior knowledge becomes harder to access to help us make sense of what we see.

How does this fit what people know? Turn this into a question of political knowledge and recognition of political actors and you see how older citizens, who often do well on these tests and have superior prior knowledge (based in part on experience), will struggle to make sense of new information as they have a hard time making use of all that experience and prior knowledge. It's there, but they have a hard time finding the facts or names to fit a familiar face -- be it politician or someone else in the news. As the news audience ages, especially for broadcast TV news but also for newspapers, we need to rethink how we tell stories to help the aging audience with the realities of difficult-to-access prior knowledge. It's there, we just need to learn ways to help them trigger that knowledge so they can better make sense of the stories we're telling.

Recognition and Hyperlinks

Neat little study in the latest Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media shows that more headline/photo hyperlinks leads to greater processing and recognition of information in a news story.

There are some differences in this set of experiments.

First, they use heartbeat and other psychophysiological measures, which is cool. Nothing beats strapping a few undergraduates into a chair and measuring their response to media content. I prefer electric shocks, but that's just me. The "increased allocation of cognitive resources" from a larger display of hyperlinks, the authors say, leads to greater recognition.

Makes sense. I do wish the authors (Wise, Bolls, and Schaefer out of the j-school at Missouri) had reported exactly what questions they used to measure recall and what the Cronbach's alpha was for their 4-item index. I'm getting PhDweebish, and maybe it's in the study and I missed it, but the alpha tells us how well the four questions hung together, their internal consistency. And recognition is different than recall, both methodologically and theoretically. Not much on this.

There's some other cool stuff here, such as the literature on why we attend more to negative versus positive images, and some use of previously rated and coded images as part of the experiment. It is important to note the power of "unpleasant" images to increase attention and, we assume, recognition. That's key here, and something journalists need to pay attention to themselves.

Name Recognition Research

I'm just getting into this, the research on name recogntion. Why? I'm kinda curious as to whether it matters how you ask the following:

• Prompt with a name, such as Dick Cheney, and ask them what office that person holds.
• Prompt with the office, such as vice president, and ask them to name the person.

I suspect the second is the more difficult. A name carries with it all the cognitive and affective baggage one would expect, including the office or position that person holds. The office? If I ask who is the VP you gotta first access what the position is, maybe get some history messed up in there, the constitutional requirements, and all that crud. It's a busy task and people are cognitive misers, which is PhDweebSpeak for we take mental shortcuts. Take a shortcut and you're more likely to be wrong, or just not answer.

Okay, but why am I writing about this?

I suspect people who rely on television or entertainment media, like Colbert or Stewart, will do okay at the name-and-then-office question option, but they'll do less well at the office-then-name question -- at least compared to people who read the news online or via ink on smushed paper. I am going to test just this in some analyses this week, perhaps for a journal submission or conference paper.

Unfortunately the data always get in the way of a good theory. I'll know in a day or two when I run some quick-and-dirty tests to see if the notion is worth pursuing.