NBC-Dateline Visits COMM.LAB

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The Dateline crew (cameraman, soundman, segment producer, assistant producer, and reporter) arrived in a truck containing enough equipment to film Titanic. and spent two days taping in the lab and another day taping an interview with Bob Krauss on a "set" they constructed in the basement of Schermerhorn. Apparently his office (which he has always regarded as spacious) was too small.

The still photos below were shot on the set with an old digital camera whose flash was unequal to the task. The one on the left shows Ezequiel Morsella and Keith Morrison, the reporter for the segment, with some of the crew in the background. The one on the right shows Bob Krauss (note the new wheelchair), with Morrison and Maia Samuel, the segment's producer, with the ubiquitous crew members in the background.

Most of the crew's time was spent in the lab, where the close quarters made taping difficult. Subjects were run in two of our prior experiments: The clips below were taken from the broadcast segment. The first one shows a subject we ran for them in Ezequiel Morsella's study of electromyographic activity during the retrieval of abstract and concrete words. Lauren Walsh is seen briefly as experimenter. In the clip next to it, Keith Morrison and Bob Krauss discuss her performance and what it tells us.

On the right below is a longish clip showing a subject run in the Rausher, Krauss and Chen study of the effects of restricting gestures on speech production. Ezequiel Morsella is the experimenter, and Lauren Walsh is the confederate to whom the subject narrates the plot of an animated RoadRunner cartoon she has just viewed, The effect of gestural restriction on the subject's memory for details of the cartoon is quite dramatic. In the interpretive commentary next to it, Bob Krauss is considerably more articulate than usual, a tribute to the skillful editing of the Dateline crew .

What was striking in all of this was how we were able to reproduce our earlier results, despite the obtrusive cameras, microphones, TV lighting, and hovering crew. Although Dateline's editors did exercise some selectivity in chosing which clips to show, the effects overall were remarkably consistent with what we found under better controlled conditions.