Attentional Inertia and Recognition Memory in Adult Television Viewing

Abstract

The theory of attentional inertia holds that attentional engagement increases over the time course of a look at television and that this engagement rapidly dissipates when the look ends. The theory was tested in a study of 41 undergraduate students' viewing of 2 hours of videotaped dramatic television programs and associated commercials. The main results were that (a) inertial engagement sustains looks across boundaries between programs and commercials, (b) inertial engagement does not carry over from one look to the next, (c) inertial engagement was associated with greater recognition memory for TV content, and (d) as predicted by a model of attentional inertia, look length distributions are approximately lognormal and hazard functions are nonmonotonic with a peak at about 1 second.