Robert Potter

Previous research has shown that structural features such as voice changes, jingle onsets, and production effects in a radio broadcast elicit cardiac orienting responses. In fact, the voice change has been shown to reliably elicit orienting without habituation after several repetitions. However, repeated onsets of two other auditory structural features—jingles and production effects—did result in habituation when the participant was exposed to them embedded in an audio production absent a central cognitive task. This article presents two experiments testing the possibility that adding a central task prevents the development of a robust neural model of the auditory structural features necessary for habituation. In both studies, results show that adding a primary cognitive task eliminated habituation to jingles and production effects. However, varying the cognitive load of the primary task across two levels of difficulty had no significant effect on habituation.

Research has used the cardiac orienting response (OR) to show that structural changes in the auditory environment cause people to briefly but automatically pay attention to messages such as radio broadcasts, podcasts, and web streaming. The voice change—an example of an auditory structural feature—elicits orienting across multiple repetitions. This article reports two experiments designed to investigate whether automatic attention allocation to repeated instances of other auditory structural features—namely production effects, jingles, and silence—is a robust phenomenon or if repetition leads to habituation. In Study 1 we show that listeners of a simulated radio broadcast exhibit ORs following the onset of auditory structural features that differ in semantic content. The prediction that listeners would not habituate to feature repetition was not supported. Instead, both jingles and synthesized production effects result …

This study explores the effect of different speaker intonation strategies in audio messages on attention, autonomic arousal, and memory. In this study, participants listened to 16 radio commercials, produced to vary in pitch range across sentences. Dependent variables were self-reported effectiveness and adequacy, psychophysiological arousal and attention, immediate word recall and recognition of information. Results showed that messages conveyed with pitch variations achieved better scores compared to commercials with a homogenous pitch range across the sentences. This was especially the case when high pitch intonation was followed by low pitch within a sentence. The results increase our understanding of the influence of pitch range on processing by establishing a concrete strategy as a best practice for improving attention and memory.

The study examined how individual words occurring in mediated messages affect listeners’ emotional and cognitive responses. Scripts from actual radio advertisements were altered by replacing original words with target words that varied in valence—either positive, negative, or neutral. The scripts were then reproduced by nonprofessional speakers. Real-time processing of the target words was examined through the use of psychophysiological measures of dynamic emotional and cognitive responses collected from subjects (n = 55) and time-locked to the stimuli. Recognition memory provided a measure of encoding efficiency. As predicted, listeners had greater frown muscle responses following the onset of negatively valenced words compared with positively valenced words. Results also showed that positively valenced words elicited orienting responses in listeners but negatively valenced words did not. Recognition data show that positively valenced words were encoded better than neutrally valenced words, followed by negatively valenced words, which was consistent with the finding for the impact of emotional words on orienting responses.

This study tested the validity of using facial electromyography (EMG) as a physiological measure of the valence of radio listeners' emotional responses to advertisements and explored the effects of message valence and listener arousal on attention and memory. A within-subjects experiment was conducted in which participants listened to ten 60-second radio advertisements that had been coded in a pretest as having either a positive or negative emotional tone. Facial EMG, heart rate, and skin conductance data were collected during exposure to the advertisements. Following exposure, participants completed free recall and recogniton memory tests. Results demonstrated the validity of using facial EMG to assess the valence of emotional response to media messages. Heart rate data suggest that negative messages receive more attention than positive ones. Furthermore, how arousing a message is appears to be a …

An experiment was designed to identify the voice change as a specific structural feature of radio that causes automatic allocation of cognitive resources to message encoding. The cardiac orienting response (OR) was used as an indication of this automatic resource allocation. It was hypothesized that listeners would exhibit cardiac ORs in response to voice changes and that the associated automatic resource allocation would result in momentary cognitive overload. Data were collected from 62 participants as they listened to nine messages that varied in the number of voice changes they contained. Results show robust cardiac orienting to voice changes and suggest that this response does not habituate over the course of 2-minute messages. Furthermore, auditory recognition data show that not only does orienting to voice changes result in momentary cognitive overload, but the severity of that overload depends on …

Twenty-five participants listened to 8 radio messages—half of which were greater in auditory structural complexity. Physiological measures were taken during message presentation, and self-report measures after each. Results show that increased auditory structural complexity led to higher self-reported and physiological arousal, better attitudes toward the messages overall and toward their nonclaim components. There were no differences in attitudes toward the claims made in the messages at each level of structural complexity. Structurally complex messages were also freely recalled more often than simple messages. The prediction that messages high in auditory structural complexity would result in greater self-reported attention levels received only moderate support. Furthermore, high levels of auditory structural complexity resulted in unexpectedly higher cardiac activity compared to messages low in structural …

Two experiments explore the validity of conceptualizing musical beats as auditory structural features and the potential for increases in tempo to lead to greater sympathetic arousal, measured using skin conductance. In the first experiment, fast- and slow-paced rock and classical music excerpts were compared to silence. As expected, skin conductance response (SCR) frequency was greater during music processing than during silence. Skin conductance level (SCL) data showed that fast-paced music elicits greater activation than slow-paced music. Genre significantly interacted with tempo in SCR frequency, with faster tempo increasing activation for classical music and decreasing it for rock music. A second experiment was conducted to explore the possibility that the presumed familiarity of the genre led to this interaction. Although further evidence was found for conceptualizing musical beat onsets as auditory …

This study tested the ability of nine different auditory structural features to elicit orienting responses from radio listeners. It further tested the effect of the orienting response on listeners’ memory for information presented immediately following the orienting-eliciting structural feature. Results show that listeners do have significant decelerating cardiac patterns suggestive of orienting for eight of the nine features. Taken as a categorical whole, these features also increase recognition memory for the information presented after their onset compared to information presented immediately before.

This is your brain on media! More than just a play on words—“borrowed” from a legendary anti-drug message—beginning this book with that statement reflects how the field of media research is in the process of an exciting paradigm shift. This paradigm shift is fueled by the efforts of researchers who work from an expanded methodological toolbox that includes a variety of psychophysiological measures enabling the observation of mental processes embodied in the brain that are engaged during media consumption. Data obtained from these measures, in essence, provide a view of the human brain “on” media. The growth in research examining how the brain processes media has reached a point where we believe it should be recognized as a new, specialized area of media research that, in this book, we have termed media psychology research. Media psychology researchers go far beyond insights provided by …