One hundred seventy-one middle school students participated in a study to assess cognitive activity during television viewing. Students completed a questionnaire about their favorite programs, viewing habits, and social reality beliefs, then viewed a 17-minute professionally edited episode of a family drama and answered a multiple choice questionnaire. The subjects also kept diaries of their home television viewing for three days, from which the amount of viewing was determined for six categories: comedy, crime-adventure, drama, cartoons, public affairs, and variety. The three main learning measures were central content learning, incidental learning, and inference-making abilities. Distinguishing between attentiveness and amount of viewing, the results indicated that viewing and preference were predictably related. However, viewing was much more weakly related to attentiveness. In general, older children, girls, and those who scored higher on school achievement tests learned more from viewing the family drama episode, confirming that learning more reflected more advanced information processing skills. In contrast, attentiveness to television was unrelated to sex or academic achievement and related to grade only in ways that reflected changing program preferences with age. Surprisingly, correlations between attentiveness and learning indicated that more attentive viewing over a long term was associated with reduced learning from a specific television program. (HTH)