Children's creative imagination in response to radio and television stories

ABSTRACT

The prevailing explanation for the experimental finding that radio stores elicit more novel responses than do television stories is that viewers have difficulty dissociating themselves form ready-made television images (visualization hypothesis). In this experiment, we investigated a rival hypothesis that radio stories elicit more novel responses than do television stories because they are less well remembered (faulty-memory hypothesis). We presented 64 children at two age levels (grades 1 to 2 and 3 to 4) with one radio story and one television story, and exposed half the children in both age groups to the radio story twice to stimulate their memory. Contrary to the faulty-memory hypothesis, double presentation of a radio story did not result in fewer novel ideas than did a single presentation. In the older age group, radio stories elicited more novel responses than did television stories. We found no medium difference in the younger age group.