Arousal Responses to Interactive Media

Byron Reeves, Stanford Dept. of Communication.
reeves@stanford.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University May 19, 2000

Interactive media create new opportunities to affect psychological arousal in users. Arousal responses are important determinants of attention to media, memory for information, and evaluation of media experiences. This presentation will review the basic research about arousal responses to old and new media, and present results of new experiments that show how different media content and forms of interaction can affect physiological arousal.

Byron Reeves is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication and Director of the Institute for Communication Research at Stanford University, with an appointment in Symbolic Systems. His research is about the psychological processing of media in the areas of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses. He is co-author (with Clifford Nass) of The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (New York: Cambridge University Press). His research has been the basis for a range of products, including software agents, telephone systems, entertainment systems, and test instrumentation. His academic background is in graphic design and music (B.F.A., Southern Methodist University), and communication and psychology (Ph.D., Michigan State University).

 

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