INTERPRETING VISUAL VERSUS AUDIO MESSAGES IN TELEVISION-NEWS

A three-way experimental design examined the relative power of visual, audio, and audiovisual television messages on people's learning of and feelings about political issues. Evidence from these experiments showed that audio alone is just as effective as a combined audio and visual presentation for conveying information, including the critical interpretation of a news story. Comparing results across stories demonstrated that encoding information in a narrative form enhanced learning from the visual track alone. In stark contrast with much of the accumulated findings on the affective impact of visuals, the results here show little difference between the affective responses to audio and video channels. Rather, subjects were most emotionally aroused by a combination of audio and visual channels, which is the essential character of television.