on" to each commercial shown. First graders had slightly higher attention to the clustered commercials than to the nonclustered commercials. Fourth graders showed lower attention to the clustered than nonclustered commercials. Atkin (1975a) found higher attention to clustered commercials in his study of preschool through fifth graders, but he reports no age differences. The recent research on children's patterns of attention to television would suggest an explanation for attentional shifts toward full attention when commercials come on the air. If it is the case that by age five children have acquired adultlike viewing patterns which involve monitoring the screen interspersed with periods of inattention, then any perceptible changes in content should attract viewers' attention. It would seem likely that changes in the visual and audio channels, if even for a split second, are enough to capture an inattentive television watcher. Such changes in television content occur in the movement from programs to commercials and also from one commercial to another. Strong audio and visual shifts (even a blank screen) would appear to be cues even kindergarten children use to note changes in the content of the television and which help them monitor their television-watching. Such cues should result in looking at the television for children who are visually inattentive and perhaps other shifts in attention for children who have been attentive. It would seem to be the shift in content alone, independent of whether the commercials occur in clustered or dispersed formats, which heightened attention. In addition to shifts in attention at the onset of commercials, children as young as four have been shown to have other sorts of perceptual awareness of program-commercial separation. Gianinno and Zuckerman (I 977) have shown that about 50 percent of the four-year-old children they interviewed could correctly pick out a picture of a television commercial chara...
