Inferencing and television: A developmental study

Little research has been done to examine the cognitive processes engaged by television viewing in general, and with adolescent viewers in particular. The present study examined the extent of inferencing in adolescents' and young adults' interpretations of 3-min video segments taken from prime-time drama series and from rock music videos. It was predicted, and the results confirmed, that the less structured music video segments resulted in higher level inferencing than prime-time dramas. It was also found that young adults produced more higher-level inferences than adolescents, and prime-time drama led to more fact-based responses than music video. Correlations between television inferencing and scores on the Peel Lack of Closure Test were also examined to see if inferencing from video and from written text were related. Generally, these correlations were nonsignificant, confirming the hypotheses of other researchers that video inferencing involves unique knowledge structures that warrant further investigation.