Open Captioning as a Means of Communicating Health Information: The Role of Cognitive Load in Processing Entertainment-Education Content

ABSTRACT

Despite considerable research on entertainment-education, the influence of cognition on viewer appreciation and learning remains unclear. A pretest-posttest laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the effects of explicit health information embedded in a medical drama via video captioning on the processing of the narrative and health information and acquisition of health knowledge. The captions increased cognitive load for health information processing, facilitating recall, and retention of health knowledge. Neither cognitive load for narrative processing nor narrative absorption differed between the captioned and uncaptioned videos. The findings suggest discrete but complementary areas of cognition for entertainment content designed for health education.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Hee Jun Kim (Ph.D., University of Maryland Baltimore) in the Department of Nursing at Towson University for her consultation about the medical information included in the present study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Please contact the corresponding author for the full list of measurement items used in the study.

² Power analysis calculated by G*Power (Erdfelder et al., 1996) indicated that the total estimated sample size was 54, with the effect size of .44 obtained from the interaction effect between condition and time on the two repeated-measures outcomes of the current study.

³ We acknowledge that a more precise statistical test for the first set of hypotheses (i.e., null) would be Bayesian hypothesis testing (Ortega & Navarrete, 2017). However, we used identical statistical testing for all hypotheses for the sake of analytic consistency.

⁴ This analysis included the two video conditions (open captions vs. no open captions) because no data for narrative content recall and absorption were obtained from the control condition.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Faculty Development and Research Committee at Towson University.

Notes on contributors

Hyang-Sook Kim

Hyang-Sook Kim (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University. Her research interests include development of effective strategies for health promotion and the use of communication technology for public health education, drawing on theoretical foundations of cognitive and social psychology.

Kyongseok Kim

Kyongseok Kim (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University. His research interests include audience motivation and information processing, strategic communication using new media, and health and environmental communication.