However, structural features of the television stimulus can affect the short-term, phasic or local aspects of the viewer's attention. Effect of Formal Features on Involuntary Responses Reeves et. Formal features of TV advertisements, especially unexpected movement tends to cause alpha brain waves to drop. Indeed, both recall and recognition are better under certain circumstances when alpha is suppressed. Children with more developed story schema required less cognitive capacity to process a story than did children with less developed story schemas.
Many structural features elicit involuntary orienting responses in TV viewers.
These are involuntary calls for attention caused by novel or signal stimuli in the environment. If the simultaneous performance of the two simultaneous tasks overloads capacity, then performance on one or the other will suffer. If the structure of TV demands very high levels of effort and attention, there will be little left over for remembering the stimulus. Lang has been able to show that TV structural features produced the characteristic decrease in heart rate associated with an orienting response. However, if formal features come at a faster pace, task demands may exceed capacity limits and memory for the material following the formal feature may be inhibited.