Here is a little quiz. Do each of the following as best you can. 1. Hum the theme music from the movie Jaws. 2. Sing Thriller by Michael Jackson. 3. Name the six characters on Friends. Most people can accurately do each of the above, because it is virtually impossible to escape the influence of mass media. It is not the scope of this chapter to attempt to define exactly what the mass media are, because the concept of media is evolving and means different things to different people. While mass media have traditionally been seen as encompassing print (newspapers and magazines) and electronic/broadcast (radio and television), recent technology has blurred the distinctions between media and entertainment and between mass and personal media. Such activities as using the Internet, watching movies, or playing video games are often considered a part of media. People spend more time each week watching television than in any other activity except sleeping and working (Harris, 2004). In 2003, 13- and 14-year-olds spent almost 14 hours a week watching television and almost 17 hours on the Internet (J. Weaver, 2003a). Seventy per cent of college students play video games at least “once in a while” (J. Weaver, 2003b). Moreover, there are around 1500 daily and 8000 weekly newspapers and over 11,000 different magazines published in the U.S. (Wilson & Wilson, 1998). Mass media can benefit society by reporting daily news, playing the Top 40 music hits, or televising public service announcements. However, there are also some negative aspects to media. For example, violent television and video games have been blamed for everything from a casual attitude toward mayhem to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Whether positive or negative, the mass media clearly do affect people’s lives. Although social psychologists have been studying these effects for decades, only more recently have cognitive psychologists seriously begun to look at mass media, exploring their effects on certain cognitive processes. This chapter discusses the general cognitive processes of attention, comprehension and memory, and decision making, and discusses how the media influences each. Media are a major source of knowledge, and how individuals process that information is vitally important to understanding their effects on attitudes and behavior. Attention Attention has long been an important area of study in cognitive psychology. Sternberg (2003) defines attention as a means of reducing the total amount of information that exists in the environment to a smaller amount that affords further processing, making attention clearly relevant to the mass media with its abundance of information. Specifically, cognitive psychologists studying media effects are concerned with allocation of attention and multi-tasking of media, both of which greatly affect media consumers and producers. Allocation of Attention to Media Since the media often contain large quantities of information, and people have limited processing ability, much media content is necessarily only incompletely processed. Although this issue applies to all media, research has predominantly focused on how people allocate attention to television. Although the average person watches 3-4 hours of television a day, having the television on does not necessarily mean that everyone in the room is fully attending to it. When the television is on, adults and children will only attend to it between 58 and 75 % of the time (Schmitt, Woolf, & Anderson, 2003). However, children do not attend to all television equally. They attend more to television when they fully comprehend the program (Anderson, Lorch, Field, & Sanders, 1981). For example, children pay more attention to child-based content than adult-based content (Luecke-Aleksa, Anderson, Collins, & Schmitt, 1995) and attend to children’s television programs twice as much when no toys are present in the room competing for their attention as when toys are present (Lorch, Anderson, & Levin, 1979). Cognitive development is enhanced when actively attending to educational television programming (Anderson, Bryant, Wilder, Santomero, Williams, & Crawley, 2000), and children attend better to television programs when there are short scenes, much movement, and purposeful character behavior (Schmitt, Anderson, & Collins, 1999). Sometimes a media message may require considerable attentional resources, and other times much fewer. This distinction is captured by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which posits two methods through which the consumer may be persuaded (Petty, Priester, & Briñol, 2002). The central route involves active processing of the content by a thinking person, while the peripheral route assumes a more direct effect of the superficial aspects of the media or message (e.g., attractiveness of source) on a relatively passive viewer. Persuasion through the peripheral route requires little attention allocation and occurs when