Kansas State researchers say that distracting visuals on TV screens make viewers less likely to retain content:

In the past few years, television stations have begun to reformat their screen presentations to include scrolling screens, sports scores, stock prices and current weather news. These visual elements are all designed to give viewers what they want when they want it.

However, Kansas State University professors Lori Bergen and Tom Grimes say that it's not working.

"Our conclusion has been that if you want people to understand the news better, then get that stuff off the screen," Grimes said. "Clean it up and get it off because it is simply making it more difficult for people to understand what the anchor is saying."

Grimes and Bergen are both associate professors of journalism and mass communications. They have collaborated with Deborah Potter, head of the Washington, D.C., research firm Newslab, in a study on distracting visual information. The study focused on viewers' ability to digest content in the presence of distracting information on the screen.

"We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen -- the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast -- are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."

...via BoingBoing