Lisa Farman, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication, presented her research at the 2018 annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, held in Washington, D.C., August 6-9. Dr. Farman's blind-peer-reviewed research paper was titled: Personalized news in the age of distraction: Testing the effectiveness of personalized news under multitasking conditions. The abstract is included below:
"This experiment explored the extent to which the cognitive load experienced during multitasking affects attitudes toward and recall of personalized online news. Personalization led to increased perceived relevance of the news and involvement with news content, which led to more positive attitudes toward news. Distraction led to worse news topic recall but better detail recall. Distraction also led to less perceived credibility of the news website, which led to more negative attitudes toward the news. No interaction effects were observed, and there were no differences in recall ability based on an individual's typical multitasking habits."