Exploring the Effects of Personal Information in Television News

Abstract

We report the results of an experiment in which participants (N = 41) watched a number of television news clips containing either personal or professional stories about celebrities, while measures of information encoding, storage, and retrieval were collected together with psychophysiological measures of autonomous nervous system activity. The results show that the presence of personal information elicits attentional resources allocation and improves memory for contents, suggesting that personal information benefits from a deeper cognitive processing compared with professional information. These findings provide preliminary evidence on the cognitive effects of personal information that encourages further research on several dimensions of media use such as fandom or gossip media from a cognitive point of view