Children's Reported Investment of Mental Effort When Viewing Television

Abstract

This cross-sectional survey of 116 Black second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children and their parents included examining children's active, conscious cognitive processing of television program information during home viewing. During in-school interviews, children reported their investment of mental effort when watching child and adult types of programs. The results offer support for the view that children's mental-effort investment varies as a function of viewer age and the type of program being viewed. Children's reported investment of mental effort when viewing child programs significantly decreased from second to sixth grade. Although there appeared to be age-related increases in mental-effort investment for certain adult-program subcategories, overall investment scores for adult programs were not significantly different among the three grades. Measures of parental participation bore low but reliable relationships to children's reports of mental-effort investment for child types of programs. However, children's home-viewing variables and program familiarity explained little of the observed variation in mental-effort investment.