Nils Holmberg
Senior lecturer
Effects of online advertising on children's visual attention and task performance during free and goal-directed internet use : A media psychology approach to children's website interaction and advert distraction
Author
Summary, in English
The following two studies, investigated how advert animation affected children's online reading comprehension and information search on commercial websites. In Study 3, children aged 9 were presented with factual texts that they were instructed to read in order to answer comprehension questions. Each text was presented on a web page which also featured static or animated online adverts. In Study 4, children aged 9 were instructed to solve two online task types featuring concurrent online advertising: reading and information search. The results of these studies showed that animated online advertising had significant negative effects on children's task performance. In the third study, it was found that animated adverts had a negative effect on children's reading comprehension, and that this negative effect was stronger among children with low levels of inhibitory control. The fourth study found that advert animation had a significant positive effect on children's cognitive load across task types. Taken together, this dissertation project has studied children's online advert distraction in a wide range of realistic internet usage situations.
Department/s
- Media and Communication Studies
- Lund University Humanities Lab
Publishing year
2016
Language
English
Full text
Document type
Dissertation
Publisher
Lund University
Topic
- Media Studies
- Communication Studies
- Applied Psychology
Keywords
- online advertising
- children
- website interaction
- visual attention
- distraction
- cognitive load
- eye-tracking
- task-orientation
- media effects
- visual saliency
- executive functions
- media literacy
- inhibitory control
Status
Published
Project
- Children, advertising, and internet
Supervisor
- Helena Sandberg
- Kenneth Holmqvist
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 978-91-7753-053-4
- ISBN: 978-91-7753-052-7
Defence date
9 December 2016
Defence time
10:00
Defence place
room 104, Pufendorfinstitutet, Biskopsgatan 3, Lund
Opponent
- Jessica Taylor Piotrowski (Associate Professor)