Analysis of newscast perception by eye tracking technique - Interactive curriculae of TU Ilmenau

 The participants of the seminar are going to analyze a current and a future version of the German newscast “Tagesschau”.   For this we’ll use eye tracking technique. This method shows what people are looking at. What is an eye catcher? Which areas of the picture attract the glance? In this way we may discover the focus of interest. Afterwards we shall ask our test persons about the content and their recall of facts and pictures.

This summer the ARD, the first channel of German television, is going to start to present the news in a completely new engineered television studio in Hamburg. It is the intention of editors and designers to use in the future big and impressive, so called “strong pictures” in the background, behind the presenter, to attract the recipients’ attention. We want to find out what’s better for understanding and perception: The old version with little and quite simple graphics and pictures or the future version with opulent optical stimuli. To evaluate this we’ll test about forty probands. We want to find our test persons by newspaper advertising and reporting. Seminar participants have to elect suitable candidates for the project.

In this seminar we have nearly ideal conditions for comparing two kinds of newscast as the ARD is going to produce the “Tagesschau” over several weeks parallel, in old and in future version, to gain experience with the new studio. The contents of both versions will be the same in each case. Only the presenters will be different.

If you want to take part in the seminar, you should be dedicated to this research. For ensuring good and effective team work, the number of participants is limited to fifteen students. We have to analyze the content of German newscasts and we’ll work with German test persons. Therefore the seminar is reserved to students with very good knowledge of German language. The seminar paper, however, has to be written in English.