Learning from Television

Seeing Is Remembering:
How Visuals Contribute to
Learning from Television News
by Doris A. Graber

In some respects, the age of television has turned back the clock of human
learning to an earlier age when most learning was based on what the eye could
observe directly. Television makes it possible to see events happen, immediately or after some delay, rather than having to rely only on verbal descriptions.
Since print news, even using still pictures and graphics, can never completely
capture the actual happening, one might expect people in the television age to
have a better grasp on reality, including the political world, than ever before.
Apparently, this expectation has not been fulfilled. Most current research indicates disappointing levels of learning about politics for most Americans,
despite the ample pictorial content of television news (28).
Four explanations for the puzzle will be explored in this article. The first
one, to which a number of scholars have alluded, concerns how visual information is presented: Information may be lost because its manner of presentation
makes it difficult to absorb. A second possibility, for which little research evidence has been presented thus far, is that visuals contain too little information
to produce substantial knowledge gains. A third possibility is that the problem
lies with the audience, which for a variety of reasons may ignore much of the
The visual elements of television news have not received a great deal of attention in the past, for
both theoretical and methodological reasons. It has been argued that examination of visuals is not
worthwhile either because they merely reiterate points already made by the words or because they
convey purely idiosyncratic meanings. Even when research evidence has debunked this theory on
both scores, there still remains the major obstacle of coding visual content (1, 10, 11, 13, 22). The
average news broadcast presents a large number of complex pictures with many potentially significant
details. Coding them all is an overwhelming task made more complex by the fact that these pictures
are filmed to record motion and therefore are constantly changing. Camera angles change, as does
camera distance. Photographic techniques like zoom shots, fade-ins and fade-outs, and dissolves
present varied images to the eye. However, content analysts can now master such complexity by
gestalt coding, as described later.
Doris A. Graber is Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
Copyright 0 1990Journal of Communicarion 40(3), Summer. 0021-9916/90/$0.0+.05

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visual information presented to it. The information may be difficult to process

because the audience has been conditioned to concentrate on the verbal information; or the audience may use visuals merely as cues to retrieve pictures
already stored in memory. Finally, it is possible that audiences do learn a great
deal from the pictures but that the information gain has not been measured
appropriately. Because television news in the United States has taken its basic
structure from print news, most researchers regard and treat the text as the primary carrier of information and structure measures of information recall accordingly. Visuals are judged primarily by what they contribute to the verbal text,
not by what they may contribute independently.
To assess the manner of presentation of television news and the information contained in audiovisuals, we analyzed a series of television
news stories with spedal attention to the nature and contributions of
the visual aspects of the broadcast. Two sets of newscasts were involved.
The first set (from which the tables below are drawn) consists of all political
stories from the early evening national news videotaped during the first two
weeks of February 1985: 61 stories on ABC, 46 on CBS, 42 on NBC, and 40 on
PBS (MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour), for a total of 189. To guard against the
danger that the week chosen might be atypical, we also randomly selected 150
national and local news stories from the early and late evening broadcasts for
analysis. These were taped over four months from January to April 1985.
For each news story, two coders recorded routine information, such as network, date, anchors and reporters names, and story length. They also recorded
each news storys main topic, as stated in the introduction, and identified the
verbal themes presented in the story, identifylng a total of 394 separate verbal
themes. Because the opening theme is highly significant, we coded how it was
treated audiovisually and what kind of spin it created for the story.
We also recorded all visual scenes, classifymg them according to their main
focus. A scene was identified as a shot or shots of the same subject, bounded
by adjacent scenes of different subjects. A new scene meant cutting to a com-

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

pletely new subject, not merely motion within a scene, or a pan shot, or a
change in focus through zooming or changing angles. The recorded focus of
each scene could be people, animals, inanimate objects, locations, or views of
graphics or text. Coders further classified visual scenes into close, mediumlength, or distant shots and identified or unidentified subjects, depending on
whether the verbal text identified the people and scenes. These distinctions
were made because audiences are likely to pay more attention to close-ups and
identified elements.
Using a gestalt coding approach, we then assessed what kinds of information, emotions, and perspectives the visuals contributed to the story. Gestalt
coding is grounded in research on information processing that has demonstrated that television viewers do not see, hear, and interpret each cue separately. Instead, they concentrate on the meanings conveyed by audiovisual
messages. Like listeners to the spoken word, they first discern a story's general
gestalt or theme. Usually, gestalt identification is easy because viewers are verbally guided, particularly by the story's verbal lead-in, to the overall meaning
and significance of the message elements that they are about to witness. For
instance, a man running along a city street can be verbally identified as an
escaping felon, a marathon runner, or a pet owner chasing his dog. Depending
on the gestalt, the audience will search subsequent scenes for appropriate
cues.
The decisions required for extracting meaning from visual and verbal themes
are neither complex nor idiosyncratic. Audiovisual television news language
works largely through stereotypical verbal and visual discourse that is designed
to be easily understood, because the story must quickly convey shared meanings to vast, diverse audiences. There is no time to ponder hidden meanings or
even delicate shadings of information. Tests in which audiences are asked
about the general, rather than idiosyncratic,meaning of television news stories
reveal that shared meanings are indeed captured (1).
Gestalt coding mimics the steps that are typical for information processing. It
starts with identification of the kinds of information that most people within a
given cultural setting normally use as cues to discern the intended meanings of
a news story. In ascertaining this meaning, coders consider the context of each
story within the total newscast, the manner of introducing and sequencing stories, and the meanings conveyed by sounds other than words. Other contextual
factors include the physical setting of the story, its historical context, and major
contemporaneous news developments. To ensure coding accuracy in making
gestalt coding evaluations,we routinely used two coders to cover the same
material. Intercoder reliability coefficients were in the .80 range. Discrepancies
between the two coders were resolved by a third coder who also checked ten
percent of the uncontested coding decisions.
Our news analysis revealed that the way television news stories are
presented does, indeed, militate against learning. Most television news

stories are quite short, which makes it difficult for them to convey much information. There is little time for providing either context or explanation. In one

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Learning from Teleuision/Seeing Is Remembering

Table I : Percent of news stories by average length of visual scenes

Time
1-10 seconds
11-20 seconds
2 1-30 seconds
More than 30 seconds

ABC
(n = 599)
%

37

31
13
19

CBS
(n = 688)
%
46
28

17
9

NBC

PBS

(n = 589)

(n = 128)

All
(n = 2002)
%

59

8
32
47

38
29
20

13

13

27
5
10

week of television news output, 33 percent of all stories were covered in less
than one minute; 79 percent took less than three minutes.
Table 1 shows average exposure times when the length of each network
news story is divided by the number of scenes depicted in it. When low-video
PBS is excluded, three out of every four stories shown by the major networks
have visual scenes that appear on the screen for less than twenty seconds, on
average. This is hardly enough time to absorb the visual information fully, considering that scenes follow each other in rapid succession with no breaks to
permit reflection. Only 13 percent of stories display visual scenes that average
more than thirty seconds. Although the length of exposure of individual scenes
varies within stories, brevity is the prevailing mode.
Information absorption is further complicated by the fact that viewers are
simultaneously bombarded with verbal information that often is only partially
redundant with the pictorial information. Leaving aside the issue of whether
visual and verbal processing can be done simultaneously or whether viewers
must alternate between brief snatches of verbal and visual processing, slighting
one or the other, the task of coping with such a rapid-fire visual and verbal
barrage is formidable. In fact, the need to attend to both pictures and words
may interfere with comprehension because it distracts viewers from the verbal
messages that provide the frame for interpreting information (8, 18).
Table 2 shows that, depending on the network (except for PBS), between
one-third and one-half of all the stories are heavily illustrated, carrying more
than ten visual scenes. This forces viewers to try to absorb a tremendous
amount of complex pictorial information. Given the extremely rapid rate at
which the information is presented, information losses become inevitable. The
PBS broadcast, which relies primarily on interviews conducted in television studios, may be more conducive to learning because its information is less
densely packed. The figures in Table 2 are conservative because our measurement criterion was tilted toward underestimation, with a "new" scene requiring
a cut to a completely different visual setting, not merely motion or a change in
focus within a particular scene.
The pictures on television news contain ample information,but this
information does not supply the kind of factual learning that sodal sdentists usually measure. As Table 3 shows, when pictures were classified
according to their primary focus, close-ups of people were the most prevalent

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

Table 2: Percent of news stories by number of vlsual scenes

Number
of scenes
1

2-4
5-10
11-20
21-54

ABC

CBS

NBC

(n = 61)

(n = 46)
%

(n = 42)

35
0
I1

32
7
5

22
33

27

12
28
23
28
10

29

PBS
(n = 40)
%

All
(n = 189)
%

35
40
23
3
0

27
19
16
21
17

type of illustration. Excluding pictures of reporters, an average of 70 percent of

the stories carried close-ups of identified persons that displayed features sufficiently clearly to permit viewers to make personality judgments. In fact, in half
the stories, close-ups of identified persons constituted one-quarter or more of
all visuals shown. Overall, of the 2,002 visual scenes contained in the 189 news
stories, one-third (665) focused on close-ups of identified people. None of the
other types of visuals came close to these figures.
The emphasis on close-ups of people is not surprising, considering that, in
order to keep its hold on the audience, American TV news adopts a set of conventions that serve to involve the viewer emotionally (15, p. 215). People
pictures are best for that, including ample footage of public figures and of
private individuals, used as symbols of the average citizen who is affected by
events and public policies. They also include ample footage of reporters and
anchors, building a relationship of trust that enhances the newscasters credibility and influence.
Close-ups of human beings are rich information sources because people
draw a multitude of inferences from human physical appearance and movements (26, 30, 32). Facial close-ups readily reveal mental states, such as pain,
happiness, sadness, curiosity, doubt, fear, and embarrassment (7). Many people
infer personality characteristics from human physical features. Tall, thin people
with glasses are considered brainy; fat, short people are deemed jolly (4).
Looking another person straight in the eye denotes honesty to most observers,
while avoiding eye contact is deemed a sign of lack of candor. Body cues,
including movements, postures, and grooming, may readily disclose a persons

Table 3: Percent of news stories by prevalence of plcture types

Picture types

ABC
CBS
(n = 61) (n = 46)
%
%

Identifiedperson close-up
Unidentified person close-up
Reporter on camera
Identifiable location
Identifiedobject close-up

82
38
72
57
20

138

70

48
76
57
17

NBC
(n = 42)
%

PBS
(n = 40)
%

All
(n = 189)
%

68
44
85
54
24

55
15
100
20
5

70
37
82
48
17

Learning from Television / Seeing Is Remembering

age, physical well-being, poise and vigor, wealth or poverty, and conformity or
nonconformity to current social norms. In fact, about 40 percent of information
about others may be communicated through body movements rather than
words (19). But this kind of information usually does not enlighten people
about complex social and political problems on a par with the type of information that is conveyed verbally in typical news stories.
Far fewer scenes focus on close-ups of locations that clearly reveal the characteristics of the terrain or structures, or close-ups of objects or animals that
provide clear images of their appearance and functioning. Unlike close-ups of
people, pictures of identified objects and locations do not readily elicit rich
inferences and emotions. In fact, they tend to capture attention only when the
objects or locations are unusual or are rarely seen. If the televised scenes or
objects are familiar, as many of them are, people routinely ignore them. Television visuals of objects and places generally become important information
sources only on the comparatively limited number of occasions when they
depict previously unknown situations for which audiences have no pre-existing
mental pictures and which would be difficult to imagine. The astronauts walk
on the moon, the Queen of England entering the House of Lords, and the wartime burning of Vietnamese villages are examples (16, 31).
The types of scenes used for television stories are notable for their routhe, stereotypical approaches. Familiar visuals as well as stylized picture
scenarios abound, making it easy for viewers to comprehend the message and
to relate it to similar information previously stored in memory. Not unexpectedly, news producers reliance on conventional visuals means that most visuals
provide comparatively little new information about the political world (33).
Comparisons of the various versions of stories produced by the networks when
covering similar types of events reveal a striking similarity of imagery.
For example, during the period under investigation, the pope, whose picture
and entourage have become widely known, visited various Latin American
countries, giving rise to a series of stories about his trip. In each case, the
broadcast opened with a formal photograph of the pontiff and a symbol indicating the country he was visiting. Occasionally, nondescript scenes of his airport
arrival were shown, usually including a view of his plane and a scene of him
kissing the ground. Then followed nearly identical scenes of the pope delivering sermons to huge crowds of cheering people. The danger of antipapal violence was indicated by scenes of the pope in his armored car or scenes of soldiers or armed police on guard. Overall, these scenes were so bereft of new
visual information that would complement the verbal messages that there was
little point in watching them more than once.
Components of stories were as stereotypical as story sequences. For instance,
stories about political negotiations generally depicted the inside or outside of
the building where the negotiations were taking place. They rarely showed the
sites that were the subjects of the negotiations. The senselessness or cruelty of
violent action was routinely depicted by showing children as victims. Public
officials were generally pictured against a symbolic backdrop, such as the White
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Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

Table 4: Percent of news storles by prlmary contrlbutlon of visuals to verbal themes

Contribution
Irrelevant information
Redundant information
New information
People or object identification
Clarification
Emotional components

ABC
(n = 61)
%

CBS
(n = 46)
%

NBC
(n = 42)
%

PBS
(n = 40)
%

All
(n = 189)
%

21
30
34
10
3
2

33
15
24
2
13
13

41

40
15

32
19
29
10
6
4

10

41

10

0
5

30
5
0

House for the president, the Capitol for members of Congress, or the Supreme
Court building or Department of Justice for court decisions. Many stories indicated their authenticity by showing pictures of reporters at the scene of the
event. When stories of crimes included pictures, they generally depicted the
harm done to victims, such as a battered, bandaged victim in a hospital bed or
removal of a murder victims draped body from the scene of the crime. Pictures
of suspects or the environment in which they lived were rarely shown.
Our examination of the visual content of television news thus confirms that
the substance of pictures, the nature of picture sequences, and the manner of
presentation all militate against transmitting the gist of typical television news
stories through the pictures-if one assumes that the verbal message represents
the gist and that the inferences drawn from close-ups of people are unimportant. To test this conclusion explicitly, we asked our television news coders,
during the initial coding of videotapes, to evaluate the primary contribution of
the visuals as a whole to the verbal themes contained in the story.
As Table 4 shows, in more than half of the stories the pictorial information
failed to enhance the verbal story line-it either added nothing at all to the
thrust of the words, or it merely repeated information already supplied verbally.
Still, in 49 percent of the stories, the visual scenes did enhance what was said.
Of these, visuals contributed new information that directly expanded the substance of the verbally provided information in 29 percent of the stories. In 10
percent, visuals helped by identifying unfamiliar people and places, and in 6
percent visuals enhanced the clarity of the verbal story. In a mere 4 percent of
the stories, the visuals added further emotional content relevant to the verbal
themes.

Would television news audiences reach simLlar conclusions when asked

about the contributions of pictures?Would they, too, use the standards of
verbal learning as the yardstick for gauging the importance of visuals?Would
their ability to process picture information be hampered because of the substance of the pictures and the manner of presentation?
To answer these questions, we conducted an experiment with 48 adults,
evenly split between men and women, and ranging in age from early twenties
to middle sixties. Pretest interviews indicated that all respondents, irrespective

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Learning from Television / Seeing Is Remembenng

of whether they were regular or sporadic viewers, claimed to be interested in

the news, either out of general curiosity or for professional or personal reasons.
Nobody claimed to watch for the sake of enjoyment, and only eight people
expressed unqualified satisfaction with television news. Dissatisfaction was
greatest among the most frequent watchers, whose disillusionment obviously
did not deter their viewing.
The group was selected, in part, to provide a best-case scenario for learning
from television news. Half were academics teaching social sciences, especially
political or media-related subjects, in a large urban university. They were
selected randomly from a pool of 282 names on the telephone rosters of relevant departments. Prospective participants who expressed no interest in watching television news were eliminated. We assumed that our group of academics
would be acutely interested in politics and exceptionally familiar with political
topics, so that high levels of attention to news, news comprehension, and
learning from news could be anticipated.
One-quarter of the participants were college students, selected randomly
from among students entering a classroom building that houses the universitys
social science classes. Presumably, these students were intellectually curious
and alert but not likely to be well versed in the daily vagaries of political news.
The remaining participants were people whose employment in assorted bluecollar, white-collar, and professional jobs did not suggest uncommonly high
concern with politics or unusual facility with processing political news. They
were recruited from a roster of names compiled by soliciting nominations from
the other participants in the experiment. The group as a whole thus represented above-average intellectual skills and interests in news, along with a liberal sprinkling of average news viewers.
We had expected the greatest information retention and learning from the
college professors, followed by students, and the least gain from the non-academic group. The underlying assumption was that information retention and
gain would be enhanced by expertise in learning,*so that the experts would
extract the most information even though much of the news would be redundant for them. The facts proved otherwise. There were high and low gainers in
all three groups. High or low scores showed little relation to the subject matter. People seemed to possess or lack a capacity for retaining and learning from
television news irrespective of the nature of the stories or their interest in a
particular topic.
Every participant was exposed to twelve news stories in a laboratory setting,
six with visuals and six others with sound only. Segments with and without
visuals were alternated. Each person was assigned to one of two demographically matched groups. The A group viewed odd-numbered stories and listened
to even-numbered ones; the B group did the reverse. The procedure permitted
us to observe how the two groups would vary in their reactions to a story when
One of the most consistent findings in TV news comprehension research is that TV news viewers
with high levels ofknowledge comprehend and recall the news significantlybetter than those viewers
who have lesser levels of knowledge (28, p. 143).

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

one group had seen it with visuals and the other without. Stories had been
paired according to six major themes so that each person could see the same
theme with or without visuals. This enabled us to compare the visuals-plussound and sound-only responses to the same basic theme. As we shall see, visuals made a difference that was apparent in the group comparisons as well as
in individuals patterns of information processing.
We selected stories typical for the medium; similar scenarios, with different
actors in different locales, appear routinely on the nightly news. Two of the
stories dealt with international trouble spots of particular concern to Americans.
One involved the issue of sending U.S. weapons to antigovernment guerrillas
in Nicaragua; the other concerned problems arising from conflict in the Middle
East between Israel and various factions fighting in Lebanon. A second pair of
stories dealt with the issue of poverty and persecution of large population
groups. One story had a North American setting, involving the issue of sanctuary in the United States for displaced Latin Americans; its counterpart, viewed
through the prism of a papal visit, involved the fate of people trapped in the
cycle of poverty in Latin America. A third pair of stories exemplified the heartthrob genre-hard-working, upright, ordinary citizens, caught in the throes of
major misfortune by forces largely beyond their control. The victims in these
stories were family farmers in the Midwest about to lose their farms and black
students losing their chance for a decent life after dropping out of high school.
A fourth pair of stories involved science topics. One discussed a newly developed pill that can safely induce abortion two months after conception; the
other dealt with the presence of cancer-producingchemicals in various industrial establishments. Another pair of stories covered comparatively dry economic news. One story dealt with the declining inflation rate, illustrated by
drops in the price of gasoline and heating fuel; the other covered the proposed
federal budget for 1986 and emphasized the major areas of increases and
decreases. The final pair of stories dealt with two politically tinged entertainment items. One story reviewed the newly instituted television coverage of the
British House of Lords as an entertaining spectacle as well as a move to build
public support for retaining the chamber. The other story covered a goodwill
trip to Europe by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to display its musical skills
and, in the process, lure visitors and traders to the Windy City.
Immediately following exposure to each story, each person was asked: If a
friend walked in right now and asked you to tell him/her what this story was
all about, how would you report it? This question is based on the assumption
that people generally talk freely and honestly with friends, so that the recapitulation will be comparatively ample. It also will cover the kinds of elements that
people consider important and of interest to peers. The initial question was
followed by several probes-Anything else?-intended to tap additional story
elements that the individual had consciously or inadvertentlywithheld initially.
When the story was shown with visuals, the participants were asked, in addition: Do you recall any of the pictures in this story?Which ones? What did
they show? Did they make the story more meaningful? In what way? Respondents were also asked about special meanings the story might have for them,

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Learning from Television / Seeing Is Remembering

so that the influence of this special relation might be assessed. Their responses
indicated that we had selected items to which large numbers of the participants could relate very well. The range was from 44 percent of the group finding a story about the Israeli pullout from Lebanon personally relevant to 83
percent who could personally relate to a story about high-school dropouts. All
the responses were tape-recorded.
To score recall and comprehension of the audiovisual messages in each
story,we identified individual verbal and visual themes. Verbal themes
were defined as ideas conveyed by a single statement or cluster of statements.

For example, in the story about the abortion pill, the following description of
the pill was considered as a single theme, even though four sentences are
involved:
Anchor: The abortion is induced by taking a pill up to two months after conception. We have this report@om France.
Reporter: In size, shape, and color, it S identical to a n aspirin. Its taken in pill
form for four days, starting two days before menstruation is due to start.
Coded in this manner, the 12 stories contained a total of 214 verbal themes.
Visual themes were defined similarly as graphics or film scenes conveying
messages about a particular topic. In the abortion story, for example, the verbal
statement that experiments on laboratory animals produced a very high success rate with mice and rabbits was illustrated with five scenes of animals. As
recorded in our picture protocols, these consisted of (a) rubber-gloved
woman and man in lab coats, stroking belly of brown rabbit, apparently looking
for injection site; (b) hand placing mouse into mouse cage with multiple white
mice; (c) close-up of white mouse held by tail, hands visible, white lab coat in
background; (d) baby chick behind cage bars; (e) pan shot of cages showing
adult chickens. There were 135 visual themes. We grouped verbal statements
and visual scenes into themes, rather than analyzing them separately, because
that simulates what audiences do when they process information (13, 33).
Individual stories in the experiment contained from 10 to 26 verbal themes,
with one-third using 10 to 15 themes, one-third using 16 to 20 themes, and
one-third using 21 to 26 themes. There was no relation between the length of
stories-which ranged from 1%to 3% minutes-and the number of major
themes they contained. The average was 18 verbal themes per story. The numbers are an indication of the amount of information made available to the audience and the possibilities for learning. Themes vary, of course, in their importance and attractiveness for the audience, so that one would not expect all of
them to be equally well remembered. We found, however, that few themes
were totally ignored by all audience members.
The numbers of visual themes ranged from 7 to 19 per story, well below the
average number of verbal themes. Science and economy stories tended to have
the fewest, except when the presentation included graphics. Unlike verbal
themes, the number of visual themes did vary with the length of the story. The

143

Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

four longest stories included an average of 14 visual themes, the middle-length

group averaged 12, and the four shortest stories averaged 9.j
The verbal and visual themes included in each news story were not
very readily retrieved from memory,even though the cards were
stacked in favor of producing high recall. As mentioned, all panelists were
interested in television news, and three-fourths of the group were professional
scholars or college students. Moreover, recall was tested immediately after the
panelists had been exposed to a single story containing an average of 18 verbal
and 11 visual themes to which they had given their undivided attention and
about which they expected to be quizzed. Numerous prompts provided respondents with an opportunity to go beyond their initial answers.
To examine how much of the audiovisual information in news stories can be
recalled immediately after exposure, we computed recall rates for all verbal
and visual themes in each story. Recall rates were low if no more than 25
percent of the respondents spontaneously recalled a theme, medium if 26 to
50 percent of the respondents mentioned the theme spontaneously, and high
if more than half of the respondents spontaneously mentioned it.
Table 5 displays the percentage of verbal and visual themes in each story
that elicited low, medium, or high recall. It shows, for example, that in the
economic story about the budget, in which there were nearly equal numbers of
visual and verbal themes, three out of four respondents failed to recall ten of
the verbal themes (48 percent). Recall was medium for another nine verbal
themes (43 percent), which were remembered by up to half the audience.
Only two themes produced high recall, being mentioned respectively by 30
and 31 respondents. These themes dealt with a sharp increase in the defense
budget and a dramatic slash in the budget for housing and urban development.
The themes that were not mentioned by the majority included information
about the procedures through which the budget is publicized, comparisons
with budget allocations in prior years, announcements of a series of minor cuts
for various departments, and mention of a five percent pay cut for federal workers. A projected deficit of $178 billion, characterized as a lot of red ink, also
elicited low recall. The slighted items were as significant as the well-remembered ones. But audiences had been more sensitized by previous media coverage of defense expenditures and were therefore more likely to note that theme
as well as the contrasting slash in social expenditures (17).
Of the 19 visual themes in the budget story, nine (47 percent) produced low
recall. One, a typed, scrolled list of names of cabinet departments whose budgets were to be frozen, was missed by every viewer. Recall was medium for
another six (32 percent) visual themes and high for four (21 percent). The
most memorable themes were three attractive emblems symbolizing cabinetIn line with the concept that pictures are less important than words, picture information is more
readily sacrificed on the altar of time savings than verbal information.This becomes particularlyclear
when one compares versions of the same story on different broadcasts either by the same station or
by competing stations. For example, stories first broadcast in the earlyevening are often pared through
picture reduction when they are aired on a later broadcast.

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Table 5: level of recall of verbal and vlsual themes (In percentages)

Story
Fights in Central America
Fights in Middle East
Social policy-sanctuary
Social policy-Pope in LA
Heartthrob-pupils
Heartthrob-farmers
Science-abortion pill
Science-chemical poison
Economy-inflation
Economy-budget
Shows-Lords on TV
Shows-ChicagoSymphony

Verbal themes
Low Mod. High
n
%
%
%

12
18
10
21
14
26

17
22
18
21
20
15

58
67
40
62
36
73
41
55
44
48
55
33

33
22
30
14
43
23
35
23
33
43
40
40

8
I1
30
24
21
4
24
23
22
10
5
26

Visual themes
Low
Mod. High
n
%
%
%

7
I1
8
18
I1
17
8
8
8
19
I1
9

14
27
37
39
18
53
38
38
13
47
36
22

29
45
37
28
36
35
25
13
38
32
18

33

57
27
26
33
45
12
38
50
50
21
45
44

Low recall = 0-25 percent of respondents spontaneously mention; moderate recall = 2650 percent of respondents spontaneously mention; high recall = 51-100 percent of respondents spontaneously mention.

level departments and displaying arrows to indicate the size and direction of
budgetary changes, along with a shot of President Reagan. Interestingly,
though more than half of the viewers recalled seeing the president, hardly anyone recalled the gist of his brief remarks.
For all but the story on budget proposals, the most widely recalled verbal
themes were either the anchors statements or the opening statements by the
reporter. In each case, these statements were verbal summaries of the main
story idea, fleshed out by subsequent statements. Comments by our respondents made it clear that they concentrated on capsule summaries as the quickest and easiest way to capture a storys meaning. They gave only limited attention to the rest of the story, citing as reasons a lack of deep interest and a
desire to escape the processing burdens imposed by the manner of news presentation. This is typical information-processingbehavior, of course. To avoid
information overloads, people extract only a limited number of basic themes
from news presented to them and discard the rest (13). The best strategy for
extracting the bare bones of essential news with a minimum of effort, in most
cases, is to attend to the anchorsor reporters initial statement.
Visual themes proved to be more memorable than verbal ones. Overall,
70 to 95 percent of the verbal themes in each story failed to capture the atten-

tion of at least half the respondents, who did not mention them during openended questioning. Out of a total of 214 verbal themes, only 34 (16 percent)
were spontaneously recalled by more than half the respondents. That is a very
high rate of information loss. Visual themes were far more memorable, with 46
out of 135 (34 percent) recalled by more than half the respondents.
One might argue that this is an unfair comparison because the average story
contains substantially more verbal than visual themes, decreasing the chances
that a given theme will be selected. But that misses the main point, which is

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

that much more of the visual information contained in news stories reaches the
audience. A greater portion of the verbal information is waste, in part because
it represents an overload of information that cannot be processed in the available time and in part because the audience is not interested. Most people also
find it easier to process television visuals than verbal information. A group of
masked refugees or President Reagans smiling face is easily noted and remembered, because the mass of visual detail can be absorbed at a mere glance.
Words, by contrast, must be processed sequentially and often represent complex, abstract information (26). If memorability and learning are, indeed,
linked, ease of processing becomes a significant learning factor. Our research
suggests that visual themes are remembered and learned more readily than verbal themes (6; 23; 26, p. 387; 34).
More than half of our respondents recalled three types of visuals, making
them potentially valuable for increasing comprehension and information gain.
The first group, close-ups of very familiar people such as presidents or popes,
were almost always noted. A second type that rarely escaped notice involved
close-ups of unfamiliar people in exotic circumstances. Examples were the
masked refugees, who were recalled by every respondent, and scenes of Latin
American or Middle Eastern people that showed how people live in foreign
cultures. The third category, somewhat less memorable, involved close-up
views of unfamiliar people who became noteworthy to the audience because it
could hear them express their views. The common denominator in these patterns of memorability is the depiction of human beings.
Largely unmentioned were stereotypical pictures providing factual information that further clarified the verbal statements. Examples are pictures of farms
that illustrate the areas most affected by the farm crisis or pictures of chemical
plants designated as polluters. Similarly, viewers generally failed to recall socalled establishing shots that indicate where action is taking place, such as a
picture of the Supreme Court building when its decisions are discussed. Nor
did they recall distant shots of various activities, including friendly and hostile
crowd actions, and they paid only slight attention to vistas of scenes well
known from everyday life, such as domestic animals, customers buying gasoline, or scientists handling test tubes.
These patterns of viewing indicate that the greatest information gains come
from unusual sights and from pictures of people that provide audiences with
information about the characteristics of the figures on the screen and enable
these audiences to develop reactions to the pictured individuals. But this type
of information rarely advances the story line directly. Audiences generally fail
to process information that is not personalized and that is neither very familiar
nor very unusual. Much of the information that could advance the story line is
contained in this middle range.
Are low levels of learning from television news due at least in part to
schematic processing of verbal and visual information?Research on
information processing indicates that people form schemata-commonsense

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Learning from Television / Seeing Is Remembering

Table 6: Percent of respondents (n = 24) who add lnlormatlon to or misrepresent

pictures and text

Storv
Fights in Central America
Fights in Middle East
Social policy-sanctuary
Social policy-Pope in LA
Heartthrob-pupils
Heartthrob-farmers
Science-abortion pill
Science-chemical poison
Economy-inflation
Economy-budget
Shows-Lords on TV
Shows-Chicago Symphony

Saw verbal only

Add
Err
%
%

39
36
32
30
35
32
35
16
17
20
28
26

44
24
28
52
17
32
52
40
52
44
20
22

Saw visual and verbal

Add
70

Err

24
30
13
9
4
4
4
4
4
9
5
16

16
17
22
14
17
17
20
13
21
30
14
24

models of their world-that permit them to cope with the flood of new current
information by comparing it to the schema. If the new information appears to
be similar to the model, it does not have to be processed afresh. The model is
retained and the new information largely ignored (9). Do people actually use
schematic processing so that the themes presented in news stories are used
primarily as triggers to stored memories and produce little new learning? Does
better recall for visual themes indicate that they are less subject to schematic
processing?
Table 6 provides answers to these questions. It records two very powerful
cues to schematic processing: the presentation of extraneous information, and
high rates of errors in reporting. Social psychological research indicates that,
when people embellish the verbal and visual facts they have just heard and
seen in a news story with verbal and visual facts that are absent from the story,
the extraneous information tends to come from schemata stored in memory
(18). However, because schematic processing does not invariably produce
embellishments, the embellishment test understates the actual rate of schematic processing. Error rates also provide evidence of schematic processing.
When people process information directly, rather than using it as cues for
schema retrieval, they make fewer errors because the actual data are used in
place of their counterparts drawn from memory.
The criteria we used for labeling information provided by respondents as
additions to the story were stringent. Two coders compared the information
reported in the interview transcripts with detailed records of the verbal and
visual information contained in the broadcasts. Information that could be
deemed a misconstruction of the information presented in the story was
labeled an error;errors were common. More than half of the respondents
made serious mistakes, for example, when reporting an economic story, a sci-

147

Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

ence story, or a story about social policy. Overall, errors outpaced additions in
the recall of both visual and verbal themes. Considering the stringency of our
criteria, it is likely that some misstatements scored as errors were actually additions. Accordingly, Table 6 may understate the actual rate of borrowing from
pre-existingschemata. To avoid comparing groups of unequal size, in Table 6
we report verbal errors and additions only for the 24 respondents who did not
see particular visuals, rather than for all 48 respondents.
Table 6 supports the inference that people do, indeed, process news stories
schematically. Every story stimulated at least some additions and errors when
its themes were reported. However, visual information apparently is treated
schematically to a lesser extent than verbal information. Fewer than half of the
participants (44 percent) originated visual additions, compared to three-quarters (75 percent) who originated verbal additions. On average, 12 percent of
the respondents made additions to each storys visual themes, compared to 28
percent who added to the verbal themes. Similarly, on average, 19 percent
made errors when reporting visual themes, compared to 36 percent who erred
when recalling verbal themes. Visuals enhanced overall accuracy: Recall of verbal statements was more error-free for eight out of twelve stories when they
were viewed with visuals. Put differently, without visuals, 77 percent of the
respondents misreported verbal themes; with visuals, this figure dropped to 67
percent. When reporting visual themes only, 58 percent of the respondents
made errors.
Although other factors may be involved as well, the findings suggest that
news consumers pay closer attention to the text whenever visual data are also
available. Schematic processing thus appears to be a factor in faulty recall, but
it plagues visual learning less than verbal learning. Again, while the comparison between errors made in reporting visual and verbal themes must be judged
in light of the fact that there were more verbal than visual themes in each
story, it is important to know that the larger amounts of verbal information led
to more errors, rather than greater clarification of the elements of the story.
There are several plausible explanations for the lesser prevalence of schematic processing for visuals. One can theorize that there is more actual processing of visual stimuli because people have more conlidence in their ability to
decipher visual information and often find visual stimuli more interesting and
appealing than verbal texts. Visual informationsgreater richness of detail also
makes it far more dBcult to schematize than verbal information. Visuals are
therefore more likely to be processed afresh and recalled accurately. Alternatively, one can theorize that people concentrate on verbal processing because
they regard the text as the chief information source. Visual cues are noted temporarily, but only modest efforts are made to schematize them. Hence fewer
visual schemata are available for later recall. The fact that adult viewers have
been socialized to concentrate on verbal information at the expense of visuals
provides support for this view. So does the fact that people ofcen listen to television news, ignoring the pictures (8). However, this also may be an indication
that schemata have been developed for many visuals, so that people watch only
what they have not previously seen.
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Learning from Television / Seeing Is Remembering

Table 7: Actual and potentlal contrlbutlons of vlsuals (In percentage of responses)

Potential

Contribution

Actual
(n = 263)
%

Adds reality
Adds clarification
Adds emotion
Adds nothing
Adds information
Misses potential
Detracts
Helps memory
Adds interest
Duplicates schema
Depends on picture

34
16
13
13
I1
5
4
3
0
0
0

19
14
6
18

(n = 263)
%

3
6
5
11
8
1

What contributions to story comprehension and to information gain

did the respondents themselves attribute to the visuals?Table 7 presents

two types of responses (with dont know responses omitted). The first column contains the chief evaluation given when people were asked, immediately
after viewing each of six stories, what the visuals had contributed to it; this is
their actual appraisal. The second column presents answers when the respondents had heard each of six stories without visuals and were asked what pictures might have contributed; those answers are labeled potential. They
reveal peoples expectations-they could have shown much better picturesand judgments about visuals. These appraisals may affect their eagerness to
extract meanings from visual themes. They also shed light on the extent to
which people consider visuals redundant with their schemata, as indicated by
the comment: Iveseen more than enough pictures of that. I know what it
looks like. Table 7 presents the responses in the aggregate; Table 8 presents
them separately for each story.
Compared to the assessments presented in Table 4, which judged the contribution of visuals to the verbal themes, the responses in Tables 7 and 8, when
visuals are assessed in their own right, are quite different. People who have just
viewed a story and who judge the visuals without explicit references to the verbal text are most impressed by the fact that visuals make stories more realistic.
Fully a third (34 percent) of the judgments made by respondents immediately
after viewing stressed this element. This emphasis is further evidence that people do watch visual information, rather than relying mostly on their schemata.
Just under a fifth of responses made by people who had not seen the visuals
suggested that visuals would have enhanced realism. When judgments are
made using verbal content as the yardstick, as reported in Table 4, the element
of realism does not surface at all.
Our respondents believed that the visuals allowed them to form more complete and accurate impressions of people and events. They could see, for example, how physically debilitated a group of refugees looked, and they could
149

Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

Table 8: Percent of positive, neutral, and negative appraisals of actual and

potential contributions of visuals to lndlvlduai stories
Potential (n = 263)

Actual (n = 263)
Positive
%
Fights in Central America
Fights in Middle East
Social policy-sanctuary
Social policy-Pope in LA
Heartthrob-pupils
Heartthrob-farmers
Science-abortion pill
Science-chemical poison
Economy-inflation
Economy-budget
Shows-Lords on TV
Shows-Chicago Symphony

78
74
79
96
92
95
54
45
63
77
94
90

Neutral
%
17
9
17
4

8
0
23
30
29
0
6
5

Negative
%

Positive
%

NegaNeutral tive
%
%

4
17
4
0
0
5
23
25
8
23
0
5

50
58
50
82
74
63
27
48
66
63
96
81

35
28
46
9
26
29
55
39
29
23
0
14

15
14
4
9
0
8
18
13
5
14
4
5

Positive includes "adds reality," "adds clarification," "adds emotion," "adds information,"
"helps memory," and "adds interest." Neutfd includes "adds nothing." "duplicates schema," and "depends on picture." Negative includes "misses potential" and "detracts."

determine the vintage of weapons used by Central American soldiers when this
crucial information was not available from the text. They could judge the
enthusiasm of crowds surrounding the pontiff or the mayor of Chicago in terms
of their own sense of what constitutes high or moderate enthusiasm. And they
could compare the new visual images of battle scenes in the Middle East or
President Reagan's style in addressing farmers with images stored in memory.
These memories could enable them to judge the similarity of these situations
to prior events and to assess changes in the appearance of public figures that
might attest to their health and vigor. Such valuable knowledge has generally
been ignored in assessing learning because it does not add directly to the textual inf~rmation.~
The second most common contribution mentioned by respondents who had
viewed visuals was the fact that they clarify the story. They make it easier to
assess the scope of a disaster, judge living conditions in a prison cell, or tell
who is speaking in a group. Among those discussing the potential contribution
of visuals, this reason ranked third, and it ranked low for judgments made on a
purely verbal basis. Interestingly, few of the scenes that clarified the various
stories were actually mentioned by viewers during story recapitulation. This
suggests that viewers may actually use these scenes but forget that they did.
Just as people extract meanings from words and then promptly forget them, so
they may extract meanings from visuals without storing them for later retrieval.
In fact, the "reality" displayed on television may be false, "a dramatic pseudo-reality created from
an ongoing flow of happenings 'out there' but transformed into an entertaining story that conforms
to the logic of the medium while assisting people to relate those events to their everyday lives" ( 2 4 ,
p. 16). Picture choice and framing thus may distort facts or mislead to inaccurate interpretations.

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Learning from Television/ Seeing Is Remembering

Next in importance, viewers listed the emotional impact of visuals. Considering the frequent use of close-ups of human beings, many of them showing
faces in larger-than-lifedetail, this emphasis is understandable. What is puzzling, however, is that it ranks far lower-in seventh place-in the contributions of visuals anticipated by nonviewers. One possible explanation is that
people who do not see the visuals adopt a more verbal perspective. As Table 4
shows, from that perspective emotional information is minimal.
Another interesting finding evident from Table 7 is that supplying additional
information is not ranked as a major contribution of visuals (in fifth place for
viewers as well as nonviewers). Our respondents made this judgment using the
common assumption that the verbal text presents the gist of the news. Addition means supplementing the verbal story. They thus concurred with the
observation that visuals enhance the textual information only moderately. Table
7 also shows that viewers did not find that visuals made the news more interesting, whereas 11 percent of the nonviewers, in accord with many television
analysts, claimed that visuals enhanced interest. The fact that visuals are or
might be a memory aid also surfaced only rarely.
Negative judgments about visuals were comparatively rare. Only four percent
of the viewers responses indicated that visuals detracted from the story; this
figure rose to six percent in judgments by nonviewers. A limited number of
responses indicated that visuals fell short of their potential or that the potential
contribution of a visual very much hinges on its nature.
Thirteen percent of viewers responses indicated (without giving reasons)
that visuals added nothing to the story, compared to 18 percent of nonviewers
responses. A n additional eight percent of responses indicated that visuals duplicate what viewers already know. Given that most television pictures are highly
stereotypical and that descriptions by nonviewers of what the pictures probably
showed tended to be highly accurate, those giving this response were probably
right. In fact, the availability of schemata may explain why 18 percent of nonviewers responses and 13 percent of viewers responses suggested that visuals
made no contribution.

There was little unanimity about whether visuals for a given story
were helpful, useless, or harmfuland what the predse nature of the
benefits or disadvantages might be in each case. As Table 8 shows, the
visuals for the story on Latin Americas poor, the entertainment-relatedstories
about the House of Lords and the Chicago Symphony, and the two heartthrob
stories were rated most highly by viewers (favorably rated in 90 percent or
more of the appraisals). These stories were particularly rich in facial close-ups,
and several depicted colorful foreign settings. As is common for such human
interest stories, the subject matter was better suited to visual than to verbal
expression, and the audience reacted accordingly.
The two science stories and the inflation story earned the fewest plaudits. In
fact, the story about chemical pollution received more neutral and negative
comments than positive ones, and neutral and negative comments about the
abortion story made up nearly half of the comments. Viewers complained most

151

Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

about a lack of visuals that would clarify the scientific aspects of these stories.
Nonviewers judgments were similar though not identical, with high marks for
human interest and entertainment stories and low marks for science stories and
economic news.
The discrepancies shown in Tables 7 and 8 between judgments based on
actual viewing and judgments based on conjecture are intriguing, particularly
in light of the fact that conjecture took place only minutes after visuals had
been viewed, albeit covering a different subject. These picture sequences
should have been powerful reminders about picture potential. Overall, those
who saw the visuals had more positive perceptions of their usefulness than
those who did not. For nine out of twelve stories, actual benefits were
appraised more highly than anticipated ones. Such discrepancies may spring
from the fact that people rarely think about the contributions made by the
visual aspects of television. They do not have ready answers available to questions, and their conjectures therefore represent quick and tentative attempts at
value judgments. If this is the case, it is not surprising that widely publicized
stereotypes about the low quality of television news visuals should color these
snap judgments.
The communications literature confirms what our viewers told us, namely
that pictures make information transmission more rapid, realistic, and accurate
than is possible in purelyverbal messages (3, 5 , 21, 27). Visuals also forge
emotional bonds between viewers and what they view. Printed or spoken messages excel in providing story background, context, and explanation; pictures
make audiences care about an issue and the people involved in it (20). The
realism presented by television pictures enhances the credibility of news
reports (3). People gain a sense of witnessing an event when they see it presented in moving pictures. They trust what they see more than what they hear.

The contributions of visuals to story content obviously are modest if

the verbal story is the standard,but this is not the case when visual
information is considered on its own merits. Thus far our analysis has
shown that learning from television news is, indeed, made more difficult by the
rapidity of the presentation and the large number of scenes that must be processed. Substantively,most visuals contain comparatively little information that
directly advances the story line. Pictures and picture sequences are stereotypical and hence familiar. Except for close-ups of people, which are rich sources
of direct and inferred information, they contain little that is new or stimulates
thought. The audience, conditioned to consider the verbal information as the
essence of the story, focuses attention on the verbal lead-ins as accurate capsule accounts. Learning is also diminished because the audience uses schematic processing, which permits it to rely on previously processed images
(although there is evidence that schematic processing is more common for text
than for pictures).
However, despite serious transmission problems created by the current format of news presentation, and despite the stereotypical approaches to picture
sequences, visuals do convey a great deal of information. The visual format

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Learningfiom Television/ Seeing Is Remembering

makes this information accessible to most viewers because it overcomes hurdles of literacy and verbal skills. We have already noted the many inferences
that most viewers are able to draw from the face and body language revealed
by the plentiful close-ups of people shown on television. These are invaluable
in forming opinions about political leaders and are obviously important in electoral choices.
The large numbers of pictures of people focus viewers attention on the roles
played by individual actors in politics. They enshrine the politics of personality
at the expense of considering the influence of the broader political system and
at the expense of dispassionate factual analysis. This may explain why Americans tend to view major political events and even personal fates as personal
triumphs or disasters, rather than placing them in the broader context of the
political system in which they occur.
Visual cues are also used to appraise the credibility of news personnel and
the spokespersons they present to the public on television. If the spokespersons appear to be credible, the impact of their messages increases and can
bring about measurable changes in public opinion ( 2 5 ) . The high credibility
(and resulting influence) enjoyed by anchors, reporters, and many high-level
officials is largely a function of their television images.
The impact of unusual sights has been mentioned. Normally, these are rare
for mature viewers, although they abound for children whose visual experiences are more limited. However, there are times when unusual sights do have
a crucial impact on public opinion. Bloody scenes of the Vietnam War evidently crystalized strong public opposition to continued U.S. involvement ( 2 ,
14). Other examples of powerful, opinion-shapingvisuals are the parades of
political actors who face trial by television during important hearings such as
the Watergate and Irangate investigations; vistas of disease or disaster victims,
which produce outpourings of help; and sights of brutality toward defenseless
populations.
The vast majority of emotional scenes shown on television appeal to negative
feelings, such as horror, fear, and sadness. By and large, television news, like
television fiction drama, is no happy hour. The negative moods with which it
infuses political news may account for the publics often negative feelings
about the political world-the videomalaisethat Robinson ( 2 9 ) has chronicled. This is partly counterbalanced, however, by the upbeat portraits that political masters of the medium, like Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy, are able
to convey ( 1 2 ) .
Although the pictures shown to television audiences vastly expand knowledge of human aspects of stories and allow audiences to form more accurate
mental pictures of the world, they fail on many other fronts. In addition to the
many shortcomings already noted, much political information deals with complex concepts that defy quick visual illustration. For instance, without spending
a great deal of time in unfolding a story, how can one visually portray that an
alien is illegal,or that a government wants to prevent bloodshed through a
preventive military maneuver, or that deficit spending harms the nations economy?

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1990

Appraisals of the contributions made by television news must consider these

limitations. But the limitations need to be put into perspective. The very substantial information gains attributable to visuals must be acknowledged. In fact,
they may be more important to an individuals intellectual growth and understanding of the world than the verbally transmitted facts and figures. Just as it is
inappropriate to disparage the verbal aspects of the news for deficiencies in
conveying physical reality, so it is inappropriate to disparage visual scenes for
deficiencies in conveying abstractions. The television age demands the consideration of all elements of news presentation, visual as well as verbal. It requires
a reconsideration of print-age values that prize the abstractions conveyed
through words and discount the realities and feelings conveyed through pictures. We cannot afford to ignore the major ways in which learning is shaped
by the vistas gleaned by the human eye and the cognitions, emotions, and
memories that these vistas produce.

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