Watching viewers watch TV: Processing live, breaking, and emotional news in a naturalistic setting

This experimental study examines how viewers process live, breaking, and emotional television news using the Limited Capacity Model. However, unlike previous LCM research, this experiment does not take place in a laboratory, but in a naturalistic setting, using participants' eyes on screen as a measure of visual attention. Presentation (live, breaking, traditional) appeared to play an important role in selection and autoniatic allocation of resources. However, whether attention continued and the information was subsequently encoded into memory was guided by the emotional content (disgust,fear) of the message. In a natural setting, without the expectation of a memory test, viewers were very selective about what they paid attention to. Breaking and disgusting stories were the choices.