The Effects of Edits on Arousal, Attention, and Memory for Television Messages: When an Edit Is an Edit Can an Edit Be Too Much?

Abstract

This study examines the effect of the rate of edits (camera changes in the same visual scene) on viewers' arousal and memory. The rate of edits varied from slow to very fast. Results show that as the rate of edits increases physiological arousal, self-reported arousal, and memory increase. It is suggested that edits can increase attention to and encoding of television message content without significantly increasing the cognitive load of the message.