Smartphone-size screens constrain cognitive access to video news stories

ABSTRACT

Smartphones are expanding physical access to news and political information by making access to the internet available to more people, at more times throughout the day, and in more locations than ever before. But how does the portability of smartphones – afforded by their small size – affect cognitive access to news? Specifically, how do smartphone-size screens constrain attentiveness and arousal? We investigate how mobile technology constrains cognitive engagement through a lab-experimental study of individuals’ psychophysiological responses to network news on screens the size of a typical laptop computer, versus a typical smartphone. We explore heart rate variability, skin conductance levels, and the connection between skin conductance and the tone of news content. Results suggest lower levels of cognitive access to video news content on a mobile-sized screen, which has potentially important consequences for public attention to current affairs in an increasingly mobile media environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile
• news
• communication technology
• smartphone
• screen size
• Psychophysiology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Johanna Dunaway is an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University. Her most recent work examines attention to news across digital platforms, physiological responses to news content, and the relationship between news media and political behavior among elites and the mass public.

Stuart Soroka is the Michael W. Traugott Collegiate Professor of Communication Studies and Political Science, and Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. His research focuses on political communication, the sources and/or structure of public preferences for policy, and the relationships between public policy, public opinion, and mass media.

Notes

1 Testing these explanations applies insights from the literature on screens size (e.g. Lombard et al., 1996) to engage with research on mobile effects on digital citizenship (Napoli & Obar, 2014) and recent work on news negativity (e.g. Soroka & McAdams, 2015).

2 This view of engagement has much in common with ‘attention,’ at least where it is as being about more than simple exposure (e.g., Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986).

3 Note that this randomization means that respondents see varying numbers of positive and negative stories – from two negative and five positive to the opposite, five negative and two positive.

4 BBC News stories were used for stimuli because the original purpose of the experiment on which ours was modeled was to field a broadly cross-national study on news negativity.

5 For example, a news story about a shooting may be perceived as more negative if accompanied by the sound of a gunshot and witnesses screaming relative to the same story that does not include these audio features.

6 As our discussion indicates, several features of the mobile setting can just as feasibly govern engagement with news. We start with screen size because it has the most empirical and theoretical support from the literature relative to its competitors, and because the impact of differences in screen size are likely to remain constant over time, whereas mobile connection speeds and computing capacity will continue to improve.

7 Recent work raises questions about the effectiveness and importance of balance testing (Mutz, Pemantle, & Pham, 2017). Even so, randomization checks do not suggest any significant issues where balance is concerned. For instance: small-screen respondents were 77% female, while large-screen respondents were 78% female; the average age of small-screen respondents was 19.3, while it was 19.8 for large-screen respondents.

8 Though we acknowledge that for many studies the use of undergraduate student samples can be a serious limitation, we suspect that our use of student samples provides a more conservative test of our hypotheses. The age cohort represented in our sample is more likely to have extensive experience with mobile devices; we expect that any differences we observe would be more pronounced among non-college participants.

9 See the Task Force of the European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing Electrophysiology (1996) for a discussion of various measures of HRV.

10 Note that our analyses rely only on physiological quantities, not on any self-reported data. This is because we do not expect participants to be able to accurately assess their attentiveness or information processing after the experiment. Put differently, we regard the physiological measures as the best-possible indicators of real-time attentiveness and information processing.

11 For the same reason, we are not troubled by the relatively low R-squareds in the Table 2 models. Psychophysiological measures are relatively noisy, we do not expect to account for a good deal of the variance.

12 Following the experiment, participants were presented with a series of screenshots with brief story descriptions, and asked if they recalled watching that story. All participants were asked about all 10 news stories, although they only saw 7 of them. Correct recall (reporting having seen a story that the participant did actually view) ranged from 93% to 99%.