While viewing a televised drama with second-grade children, adults stated implicit relationships between important explicitly portrayed events. Children who heard the facilitating commentary scored significantly better on understanding of implicit program content related to the adult's statements than did children who heard neutral comments.…

Second, fifth, and eighth graders viewed one of four edited versions of a commercial action-adventure television program that varied in number of scenes and in degree of organization. Both recognition and recall measures were used to assess children's memory for central content, peripheral content, and implicit content. (Author/JMB)

Age differences affect children's understanding and evaluation of television content, and these differences may be related to social behavior after watching television. One type of age-related changes concerns changes in the cognitive skills that children must use to comprehend content. Studies have shown that children as old as third graders…

Reaffirms previous findings that young viewers' representations of televised dramatic narratives are incomplete and disorganized, compared to older viewers' comprehension of these programs. Also demonstrates that the information younger children retain from programs was likely to reflect stereotyped actions and events, cued by isolated, familiar…

Reviews findings of recent television research and discusses two dominant issues: the nature and determinants of children's attention to television, and the amount and kind of content retained by different age groups. It is recommended that research on media effects incorporate age-related and individual difference factors. Nineteen references are…

This study examined how children of different ages process social information from dramatic television programs. Second and eighth graders were shown edited versions of a television program that differed in complexity and the difficulty of inferring causal connections between the scenes. In addition, the scenes in half of the showings were kept in…