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Significance of the study Until recently much of the research on memory from television news focused on memory of the verbal information and all but ignored the effects of the visual stream. A growing number of studies show that viewers process information from both the audio and visual streams together and that one channel can affect memory for the other. This study looks at the synergistic relationship between verbal and visual information ? the way audio and video interact to intensify one another and affect overall memory for the message. Redundancy refers to the degree of congruence between the information in the audio and video channels of a message. Previous studies show that messages that have incongruent information between their audio and video streams receive less thorough processing than redundant messages. According to the limited capacity theory of information processing for mediated messages, there is a limited amount of resources available for processing information. If a message requires a lot of resources beyond which the viewer has an overload occurs and the processing is not completed; that is important information in the message does not go through the stages of encoding, storage and retrieval. This study is among a few that tests a specific kind of audio/visual redundancy, redundancy in valence. It often happens that the verbal content in the audio stream is negative of a subject and the video accompanying it is positive of the subject or vice versa where the audio is positive but the video is negative. Research Question1 Is there a main effect of emotional audio/visual redundancy on overall recall for the message? It also tests the visual superiority hypothesis that holds that visuals are easier to process that verbal information in the audio. Research question 2: Overall do subjects recall more of the information coming from the video channel than the audio channel? Valence is one dimension of emotion it measures the direction of emotion on a scale from positive to negative. Arousal is another dimension that measures intensity of emotion and ranges on a scale from calm to excited. Recent research is showing that, arousal controlled, positive messages are more thoroughly processed than negative messages. Research question 3 : Is there a valence effect; is the channel carrying the positive information more thoroughly processed than the one carrying the negative information? Cognitive studies on specialization of the brain?s hemispheres have shown that there can be some sort of hemispheric lateralization. The right brain which is the center for visual processing is also the center for processing negative emotions while the left brain which is the center for verbal processing is also the center for processing positive emotion. Such studies found some support to the hypothesis that negative messages are more thoroughly processed when carried in the video and positive messages are more thoroughly processed when carried in the audio. Hence the last research question, Research question 4: Is there a channel by valence interaction; do positive messages get more through processing when carried in the audio than in the video and do negative messages get more thorough processing when carried in the video than when in the audio? The study will help shed light on how viewers process information from television and the impact that emotions in the message have on overall recall. It is practical interest to messages with an informational content (like news and education) and those with persuasive content (like advertising and political campaigns). Design: This is a 2(redundancy) X 2(channel) X 2(valence) X 3(story) X 3(order) design. Order is between subjects while redundancy, channel, valence and story are within subjects. Redundancy has two levels redundant and non redundant. Valence has two levels positive valence and negative valence. Arousal is controlled for in the stories by keeping it low. Channel also has two levels audio track and video track. Story is the number of stories for each of the four conditions of redundant positive, redundant negative, non redundant with audio track carrying the positive and video track carrying the negative, and non redundant with the audio track carrying the negative and the video track carrying the positive. From a sample of 36 news stories, 12 will be chosen, three in each of the conditions. The stories are chosen based on two pretests. The first measures valence in the two streams of each news story and the second measures the overall relatedness (redundancy) between the two channels in each news story. A total of 40 subjects who are undergraduates will participate in the experiment. Dependent variables: Free recall: Subjects will list the news stories they watched. Cued recall (audio/video): Only the topic of the news story will be presented to subjects. Their writing will then be analyzed for relevant important information recalled from the audio and the video. What is regarded as ?important? information in each story is decided by a panel of professors with broadcast experience. The panel viewed the 12 stories and came up with a list of important pieces of information three in the audio and three in the video. Recognition (audio/video): 48 multiple-choice questions (4 for each news story) will test subjects? recall of important information in the story. Two of the four will be geared to information in the audio and two will be geared to information in the video. The questions are pre-tested avoid any ceiling or floor effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technique is used to measure concentration of hemodynamic changes (i.e., oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin) in the human brain, while a subject is performing specific cognitive tasks. The advance brain functions related to music are thought to implicate uniquely human abilities, and it is known to have a strong tendency for hemispheric lateralization in the brain. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of lateralization brain function in auditory cortex using fNIRS for music stimuli with background noise. It was found that the response to music with different background noise will affect different lateralization as indicated in the activation maps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]