Professor Chen-Chao Tao Receives an Outstanding Young Scholar Award
Title : Processing complex information: A selective attention approach
Abstract : How people process multiple information components on a single message is one of the key issues in the field of communication. For example, Web pages are a typical example of messages with multiple information components. A Web page usually includes content and ads competing users’ attention. This research projects combine cognitive approaches and communication research and propose a “selective attention model” attempting to explain and predict the processing of multiple information components. Particularly, perceptual load and search mode and the interaction between them are the focus of this research project. Perceptual load has been found to be a strong predictor of distractor processing but is criticized by ignoring human voluntary control of attention. On the other hand, search mode has been found as a successful concept explaining how the voluntary control of attention affects the processing of distracters. This project takes Yahoo!Taiwan and Google as examples to evaluate the robustness of the selective attention model.