ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we present an overview of some of the research on children’s attention and comprehension of television, relying particularly on our own work conducted over the last 25 years at the Center for Research on the Influences of Television on Children (CRITC). There have been two overriding objectives guiding our research. First, we have tried to understand the ecology of developing children’s media use-that is, to investigate developmental patterns and changes in media use and to understand the influences of the family and contexts on children’s use of television and other electronic media. Second, we have examined the content and forms of television as influences on children’s cognitive processing of televised information. In this work, we have attempted to
understand how TV’s form and content guide children’s attention to television, how children come to understand the medium, and how characteristics of the medium affect what children learn from it. To achieve these objectives, we have conducted naturalistic, longitudinal studies of children’s television use as well as laboratory investigations of children’s attention and comprehension of selected bits of television. The ultimate goals of this work are to gain a better understanding of cognitive and social development and the more practical objective of determining how television can be used to enhance that development.
