The Tipping Point

This may seem obvious, but it isn't. Many critics of television, to this day, argue that what's dangerous about TV is that it is addictive, that children and even adults watch it like zombies. According to this view, it is the formal features of television — violence, bright lights, loud and fu

What the pioneering television researchers of the 1960s and 1970s — in particular, Daniel Anderson at the University of Massachusetts — began to realize, however, is that this isn't how preschoolers watch TV at all. "The idea was that kids would sit, stare at the screen, and zone out," said Elizabeth Lorch, a psychologist at Amherst College. "But once we began to look carefully at what children were doing, we found out that short looks were actually more common. There was much more variation. Children didn't just sit and stare. They could divide their attention between couples of different activities. And they weren't being random. There were predictable influences on what made them look back at the screen, and these were not trivial things, not just flash and dash." Larch, for instance, once reedited an episode of SesameStreet so that certain key scenes of some of the sketches were out of order. If kids were only interested in flash and dash, that shouldn't have made a difference. The show, after all, still had songs and Muppets and bright colors and action and all the things that make Sesame Street so wonderful. But it did make a difference. The kids stopped watching. If they couldn't make sense of what they were looking at, they weren't going to look at it.

In another experiment, Lorch and Dan Anderson showed two groups of five-year-olds an episode of SesameStreet. The kids in the second group, however, were put in a room with lots of very attractive toys on the floor. As you would expect, the kids in the room without the toys watched the show about 87 percent of the time, while the kids with the toys watched only about 47 percent of the show. Kids are distracted by toys. But when they tested the two groups to see how much of the show the children remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. This result stu

If you take these two studies together — the toys study and the editing study — you reach quite a radical conclusion about children and television. Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference. It means if you want to know whether — and what — kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren't learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren't watching. Preschoolers are so sophisticated in their viewing behavior that you can determine the stickiness of children's programming by simple observation.

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. "I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV," he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who says, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season.

Palmer's i

"We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together," Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd co

Palmer tested other children's shows, like the Tom andJerry cartoons, or Captain Kangaroo, and compared what sections of those shows worked with what sections of Sesame Street worked. Whatever Palmer learned, he fed back to the show's producers and writers, so they could fine-tune the material accordingly. One of the standard myths about children's television, for example, had always been that kids love to watch animals. "The producers would bring in a cat or an anteater or an otter and show it and let it cavort around," Palmer says. "They thought that would be interesting. But our Distracter showed that it was a bomb every time." A huge effort went into a SesameStreet character called the Man from Alphabet, whose specialty was puns. Palmer showed that kids hated him. He was ca