從巴塞隆納回來的晚上，用過晚餐，馬田先生突然把電視關掉，轉開音響，
小姐我不知道這位先生有什麼算盤，以為播音樂要來好好聊天，
沒想到他制止我滔滔不絕的旅遊話題說：‘我現在要聽廣播喔!’
‘喔。’小姐我有聽懂他的意思，乖乖閉嘴。
廣播節目是BBC channel 5，在討論電視與兒童。
聽了不到一分鐘，我就意識到是他研究領域的相關話題，兩分鐘不到，我就猜到可能是他的專訪?三分鐘左右馬田先生就出場了!
十五分鐘的專訪，討論馬田今年的研究發表：電視對六到八歲孩童的吸引力大過父母親(人類)的臉!
就看廣播節目主持人一直試圖要引導馬田先生下一個電視對兒童有不好影響的結論(用專家說法來支持一個假設性的結論)，而馬田先生一直很嚴謹地用科學的態度予以保留。
聽完之後，跟馬田先生討論了一會，自己的結論倒是媒體永遠有著豐富的想像力、聯想力以及唯恐天下不亂的本事；而科學家真是實事求是，腳踏實地，又難免過於死板，不知道如何譁眾取寵。
不過，這個研究發表吸引了些許媒體的目光，不但上了Times雜誌，還上了當週’The Week’的科學新聞頭條。Times Online 摘錄下來的報導，有興趣的可以看看：
The Times .November 07, 2006
Lure of television is stronger than a smile
BY DAVID LISTER, SCOTLAND CORRESPONDENT
As every parent knows, unless you are clutching a giant bowl of sweets or the world’s cutest puppy, you become invisible when your child is watching television.
But just how much damage a few programmes every morning and evening do to children was revealed yesterday by a report showing that most six-year-olds would rather look at a blank screen than a human face.
In a study that raises disturbing questions about the ability of a generation of children to interact with others, psychologists discovered that children aged 6 to 8 respond to the image of a television as alcoholics do to pictures of drink.
In a series of experiments conducted in primary schools, most looked at a picture of a blanktelevision screen as soon as it flashed up on a computer next to a smiling face.
Markus Bindemann, a researcher in psychology at the University of Glasgow and co-author of Television at Face Value: Children’s Behaviour in Attention-Cueing Tasks, described the results as worrying.
He said: “Faces are important social stimuli and it is surprising that children prefer to look at television instead. We learn social interaction — how to deal with people and how to read them — from looking at their faces. If you just stare at a box you don’t get any genuine interactions.”
Previous research into the behaviour of young children and babies has shown that they prefer to look at faces and do so instinctively in order to learn and to communicate. This was borne out by an initial experiment on 34 five-year-olds, 25 eight-year-olds and 34 adults, in which they were each shown a photograph of a face alongside either a doll’s house, a toy boat, a toy train, a tap, a teapot or a wall clock. The overwhelming majority looked at the image of a face before the competing object.
In a second experiment, however, 143 children aged 5 to 8 were seated in front of a computer screen on which the image of a blank television screen was shown next to a face for less than a second. The children were told to press the spacebar as soon as they saw a bar of chocolate appear on the screen.
Most of the children aged 6 to 8 pressed the spacebar fastest when the chocolate bar appeared behind the picture of the television and not the face, suggesting that they were already looking at it. Only the five-year-olds responded fastest when the chocolate was behind the face.
Martin Doherty, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Stirling, who carried out the research with Dr Bindemann, said: “One of the interesting things is that five-year-olds still have a face bias but six-year-olds don’t.”
The research, which will further fuel fears that children are watching an alarming amount of television, used similar techniques to those used to test alcoholics. When shown a picture of a glass of wine or a pint of beer next to a face, most alcoholics respond to the drink.
According to recent research, the average British child aged 4 to 6 watches about 16 hours of television a week. By their teens, four out of five have a television in their bedroom. Kevin Browne, Professor of Forensic and Family Psychology at the University of Birmingham, said that the study raised questions about whether parents were using television and computers as a cheap way of entertaining their children: “How a child has been socialised in the first few years of life will seriously affect whether he or she engages with people or engages with a television screen.” He cautioned that there may be other reasons why children favour the television screen, including an “anticipation” about what they think they might see on it.
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