Impact of Number and Placement of Commercial Breaks on the Perception, Comprehension, and Memory of Films
Date
1989
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
The effects of number (0,3,6) and placement (natural, unnatural) of commercial breaks on perception, comprehension and memory were examined. Eighty-eight college students were shown one of two films and then asked to complete six tasks: (1) estimation of film's duration, (2) rating of film's comprehensibility, (3) summarization of story plot and theme, (4) scene recognition, (5) temporal ordering of scenes, and (6) identifying the location of commercial breaks. Overall, results suggest that an unnatural placement of commercial breaks has an adverse effect on cognitive processing and that performance increasingly deteriorates with more commercial breaks. Conversely, commercial breaks appearing at natural breakpoints led to a higher overall performance that was less affected by the number of commercial breaks that occurred. An effect of film was also found, suggesting that a film with a more organized plot structure can integrate natural commercial breaks more beneficially than a less-structured film.