Hayes, D. S., & Birnbaum, D. W. (1980). Preschoolers' retention of televised events: Is a picture worth a thousand words? Developmental Psychology, 16(5), 410-416.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.16.5.410
Three experiments assessed the degree to which 72 preschool children (mean age 54.2 mo) and 27 college students remembered information from the video vs audio portions of TV shows. Two types of cartoons were generated to examine this issue: a composite cartoon in which the sound track was inappropriate for the events portrayed visually and a simple cartoon in which certain events were presented only visually, only aurally, or both visually and aurally. After viewing a cartoon, Ss answered recognition questions, some of which were specific to information conveyed in only one of the modalities. For children, retention of events portrayed visually was consistently higher than retention of auditory information, whereas adults showed comparable retention of the 2 types of events. For the composite cartoons, very few children realized that a marked discrepancy existed in the visual vs auditory story lines. Results suggest that preschoolers tended to ignore large parts of the audio portions of certain TV programs and paid greater attention to the visual aspects of those presentations. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)