This experimental study examines the effects of audio and visual redundancy on recall and story understanding in television news. College students viewed a series of voice-over news stories that varied in the amount of redundancy between the two channels and then responded to both auditory and visual recall measures. The results show higher auditory recall and story understanding in the high-redundancy condition than in the lower redundancy conditions. Visual recall shows the reverse pattern with higher recall scores in the lower redundancy conditions than in the high-redundancy condition.

After presenting the major objections raised against standard formulations of the H-D method of theory testing, I identify what seems to be an important element of truth underlying the method. I then draw upon this element in an effort to develop a plausible formulation of the H-D method which avoids the various objections.

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Supervenience is often employed to indicate how one type of phenomenon is dependent upon or determined by another. I consider various forms of supervenience and attempt to show that this notion, even when taken in its strongest form, falls short of expressing a relation of genuine dependency. I then suggest what seems to be the most promising way to strengthen this notion so that it does have this effect, and then show that this emendation will not be adequate for all contexts.The concept of supervenience is often regarded as a savior of 20th century philosophy. When early efforts to reduce or analyze away the moral, the mental, or the macrophysical in favor of some more "genuine" type of reality repeatedly failed, supervenience was there to assist in the rescue. Moral properties, it was said, though not logically entailed by descriptive properties, supervene on these properties; mental events, though not identical with physical events, supervene on these events; and macrophysical objects, though not constituted by microphysical objects, supervene on these objects. In these cases the appeal to supervenience is taken to indicate how one domain of reality is dependent upon or determined by another in a way that does not compromise the logical or ontological autonomy of the two domains. And given this rather wide and diverse application of supervenience in matters of ontology, it might be suggested that the importance of supervenience for contemporary metaphysics rivals that of probability for contemporary physics. This assessment, however, would be a gross exaggeration, for as I will try to demonstrate this so-called savior effectively delivers far less than what it has seemed to promise.

Does having the pictures of political candidates help you remember the candidates' various positions on issues? The answer from three experiments was yes. Encoding specificity was ruled out because the pictures need not be present at the memory test for the benefit to accrue. Visual distinctiveness was ruled out because the benefit appears only for faces, not other distinctive visual stimuli. The data suggest that people use pictures to generate rough personality schemas (e.g., kindly), which are then used to help organize memory for the position statements. This account was supported by demonstrating that when asked, subjects generated a greater number of characteristics for candidates whose positions were accompanied by pictures than for candidates whose positions were unaccompanied by pictures. There was also a correlation between the number of characteristics generated and memory for the candidates' positions but only when the positions were accompanied by pictures (i.e., only when the putative schemas were generated). Implications are discussed for social psychology, memory, and mass communication.