thematic section
The ‘hookability’ of multimodal impact captions
A mixed-methods exploratory study of Japanese TV viewers
The use of captions has grown in recent years in both traditional and new media, particularly in terms of the
diversity of style, content, and function. Impact captions have emerged as a popular form of captions for hearing viewers and
contain rich multimodal information which is employed to capture viewer attention and enhance engagement, particularly in
situations where there is competition for viewer attention. Drawing upon relevance theory, we argue how impact captions could
effectively attract and hold visual attention owing to their balance between processing effort and contextual effects. This
exploratory study employs a dual-task paradigm and uses authentic materials and viewing situations to further examine the ability
of multimodal impact captions to attract and retain overt visual attention amongst a small sample of TV viewers. Our results
provide novel insight into the apparent highly individualised efficacy of impact captions, where we identify several variables of
interest in participants’ viewing behaviours. We conclude with a discussion of the study’s contributions, limitations, and an
outline for future work.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Impact captions
- 1.2Theoretical framework
- 2.Methodology
- 2.1Quasi-experimental design
- 2.2Procedure
- 3.Results
- 3.1Viewing behaviours
- 3.2Impact captions
- 3.3Visual attention
- 3.4Correlations between impact captions and visual attention
- 3.5Summary of results
- 3.6Retention of programme content
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References