badness of an action. These authors attempt to demonstrate through experimental or survey procedures that children of a particular age or stage level accordingly do or do not use television characters' motivations when assessing their behaviors. This is a clear-cut example of directly borrowing developmental theoretical notions and demonstrating their applicability when children are processing television information. In other situations, however, cognitive development theory in general may be less useful in directly describing or predicting age-related changes in children's construction of meaning from television. For instance, we are only beginning to examine children's understanding of various kinds of filmic techniques, such as zooms, camera movements, and montage (see Salomon, 1979). One researcher in this area, Solomon (1979), argues that these and other sorts of filmic techniques-- indeed, the whole symbol system used on television for representing reality--may actually play a role in accelerating or otherwise affecting cognitive developmental changes among child viewers. That is, Solomon argues for a reverse causality, that just as child viewers' level of cognitive development may lead them to interpret television in a certain manner, television viewing may lead to changes in their level of cognitive abilities. This is a relatively new hypothesis in the literature and has seldom been tested. Television content may pose particular difficulties for children to understand on a number of levels of "understanding." First, children must interpret the social behavior portrayed on television. The typical dramatic program of people engaging in various kinds of interpersonal relationships in usual and unusual circumstances is presented in an abbreviated form on television. Viewers must make inferences regarding motivations of characters and the relationships between characters. Sometimes the cues utilized to enable these inferences are ex...
