Abstract
Studies on the cognitive effects of film and TV medium-specific features are selectively reviewed. Particular attention is paid to the methodological problems involved in the comparisons between TV comprehension and reading comprehension. A solution is defined consisting of focusing the comparison on the level of those connective processes which are required for both kinds of comprehension inasmuch as they can be considered text comprehension, namely the bridging inferences to be drawn from prior knowledge and/or previous text information so as to preserve local text coherence. In this way, the same multiple-choice questions can be used to test both TV comprehension and reading comprehension. Two experimental investigations are reported which by using this methodology confirmed the hypothesis that less mental effort is invested by TV viewers, whose comprehension is hence lower than that of readers. A few suggestions are outlined for research into the comprehension of animation in multimedia inasmuch as it can be considered as a text.
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Lumbelli, L. (2008). From Film and Television to Multimedia Cognitive Effects. In: Rouet, JF., Lowe, R., Schnotz, W. (eds) Understanding Multimedia Documents. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73337-1_12
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