The Editing Density of Moving Images Influences Viewers’ Time Perception: The Mediating Role of Eye Movements

The present study examined whether cinematographic editing density affects viewers’ perception of time. As a second aim, based on embodied models that conceive time perception as strictly connected to the movement, we tested the hypothesis that the editing density of moving images also affects viewers’ eye movements and that these later mediate the effect of editing density on viewers’ temporal judgments. Seventy participants watched nine video clips edited by manipulating the number of cuts (slow- and fast-paced editing against a master shot, unedited condition). For each editing density, multiple video clips were created, representing three different kinds of routine actions. The participants’ eye movements were recorded while watching the video, and the participants were asked to report duration judgments and subjective passage of time judgments after watching each clip. The results showed that participants subjectively perceived that time flew more while watching fast-paced edited videos than slow-paced or unedited videos; by contrast, concerning duration judgments, participants overestimated the duration of fast-paced videos compared to the master-shot videos. Both the slow- and the fast-paced editing generated shorter fixations than the master shot, and the fast-paced editing led to shorter fixations than the slow-paced editing. Finally, compared to the unedited condition, editing led to an overestimation of durations through increased eye mobility. These findings suggest that the editing density of moving images by increasing the number of cuts effectively altered viewers’ experience of time and add further evidence to prior research showing that performed eye movement is associated with temporal judgments.     

First‐time viewers' comprehension of films: Bridging shot transitions

Which perceptual and cognitive prerequisites must be met in order to be able to comprehend a film is still unresolved and a controversial issue. In order to gain some insights into this issue, our field experiment investigates how first‐time adult viewers extract and integrate meaningful information across film cuts. Three major types of commonalities between adjacent shots were differentiated, which may help first‐time viewers with bridging the shots: pictorial, causal, and conceptual. Twenty first‐time, 20 low‐experienced and 20 high‐experienced viewers from Turkey were shown a set of short film clips containing these three kinds of commonalities. Film clips conformed also to the principles of continuity editing. Analyses of viewers' spontaneous interpretations show that first‐time viewers indeed are able to notice basic pictorial (object identity), causal (chains of activity), as well as conceptual (links between gaze direction and object attention) commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. However, first‐time viewers' comprehension of the commonalities is to a large degree fragile, indicating the lack of a basic notion of what constitutes a film.     

Influences of emotion on context memory while viewing film clips

Participants listened to words while viewing film clips (audio off). Film clips were classified as neutral, positively valenced, negatively valenced, and arousing. Memory was assessed in three ways: recall of film content, recall of words, and context recognition. In the context recognition test, participants were presented a word and determined which film clip was showing when the word was originally presented. In two experiments, context memory performance was disrupted when words were presented during negatively valenced film clips, whereas it was enhanced when words were presented during arousing film clips. Free recall of words presented during the negatively valenced films was also disrupted. These findings suggest multiple influences of emotion on memory performance.     

“Cuts in Action”: A High‐Density EEG Study Investigating the Neural Correlates of Different Editing Techniques in Film

In spite of their striking differences with real‐life perception, films are perceived and understood without effort. Cognitive film theory attributes this to the system of continuity editing, a system of editing guidelines outlining the effect of different cuts and edits on spectators. A major principle in this framework is the 180° rule, a rule recommendation that, to avoid spectators’ attention to the editing, two edited shots of the same event or action should not be filmed from angles differing in a way that expectations of spatial continuity are strongly violated. In the present study, we used high‐density EEG to explore the neural underpinnings of this rule. In particular, our analysis shows that cuts and edits in general elicit early ERP component indicating the registration of syntactic violations as known from language, music, and action processing. However, continuity edits and cuts‐across the line differ from each other regarding later components likely to be indicating the differences in spatial remapping as well as in the degree of conscious awareness of one's own perception. Interestingly, a time–frequency analysis of the occipital alpha rhythm did not support the hypothesis that such differences in processing routes are mainly linked to visual attention. On the contrary, our study found specific modulations of the central mu rhythm ERD as an indicator of sensorimotor activity, suggesting that sensorimotor networks might play an important role. We think that these findings shed new light on current discussions about the role of attention and embodied perception in film perception and should be considered when explaining spectators’ different experience of different kinds of cuts.     

Forewarning of Graphic Portrayal of Violence and the Experience of Suspenseful Drama

The present study was designed to assess the effects of forewarning of explicit violence on the experience of suspense. Male and female undergraduate students were read one of two consent forms, which either alerted them to the violent and potentially offensive content of the film they were about to see or that assured them that the graphically violent material had been cut from the film. Participants then watched one of two suspenseful film clips. Results show that respondents who were told that the film clip contained graphic violence experienced significantly more distress than respondents who were told that graphic violent content had been cut. Gender differences also emerged, with females responding more strongly to the film clips than did the males. The mediating role of empathic sensitivity in the experience of suspense was considered in interpreting the observed gender differences.     

变化盲视的最新研究进展

变化盲视指观察者不能探测到客体或情境中的变化 ,是近十年以来认知心理学的研究热点之一。变化盲视可发生在各种实验条件下。例如 ,在扫视、眨眼、电影镜头切换时发生的变化以及真实情景的交互作用中发生的变化 ,观察者都有可能探测不到。本文介绍了近年来对于变化盲视的研究成果 ,包括经常使用的实验范式和对这个现象的解释等     

Current Approaches to Change Blindness

Across saccades, blinks, blank screens, movie cuts, and other interruptions, observers fail to detect substantial changes to the visual details of objects and scenes. This inability to spot changes (“change blindness”) is the focus of this special issue of Visual Cognition. This introductory paper briefly reviews recent studies of change blindness, noting the relation of these findings to earlier research and discussing the inferences we can draw from them. Most explanations of change blindness assume that we fail to detect changes because the changed display masks or overwrites the initial display. Here I draw a distinction between intentional and incidental change detection tasks and consider how alternatives to the “overwriting” explanation may provide better explanations for change blindness.     

Audiovisual presentation of video-recorded stimuli at a high frame rate

A method for creating and presenting video-recorded synchronized audiovisual stimuli at a high frame rate—which would be highly useful for psychophysical studies on, for example, just-noticeable differences and gating—is presented. Methods for accomplishing this include recording audio and video separately using an exact synchronization signal, editing the recordings and finding exact synchronization points, and presenting the synchronized audiovisual stimuli with a desired frame rate on a cathode ray tube display using MATLAB and Psychophysics Toolbox 3. The methods from an empirical gating study (Moradi, Lidestam, & Rönnberg, Frontiers in Psychology 4:359, 2013) are presented as an example of the implementation of playback at 120 fps.     

Cutting film violence: effects on perceptions, enjoyment, and arousal

The authors investigated the effects of cutting specific graphic scenes of film violence on self-reports of arousal, enjoyability, and perceptions of violence among a sample of U.S. students. In 3 studies, they varied film exposure from 1 1/2 min in the 1st study to a complete motion picture (American vs. British version of same film) in the 3rd. In all 3 studies, the participants rated the cut versions as less violent than the uncut versions. The participants distinguished quite subtle differences in levels of violence, even when the cuts were minor and contextualized within an entire movie. Cutting the movie significantly increased its enjoyability for the women; for the men, there was no significant difference. Cutting violent films made no difference in arousal for the men but substantially lowered self-report levels of arousal for the women.     

Perceiving the language of films.

Children appear to be familiar with the language of film makers or at least to perceive and remember films less well when the rules of this cinematic language are broken. In this experiment a simple action sequence filmed from a static viewpoint was made up into two films of four shots. One film was edited according to the rules of directional continuity specified by Hollywood cinema, that is the four shots were presented so as to preserve the subject's direction of movement across cuts. The other film was edited disregarding these rules. Apart from this difference both films were identical. Children aged seven, nine, and thirteen years watched either of these films and reconstructed the action using pictures representing the four shots. The children who saw the conventional version were better able to reconstruct what they had seen than those who saw the unconventional version.     

More than words: Judgments of politicians and the role of different communication channels

We collected short video clips of speakers and created five types of stimuli: (1) the original videos, (2) the audio tracks only, (3) single pictures only, (4) speech content, and (5) stick-figure animations displaying body motion. Participants rated these stimuli on a brief Big Five personality inventory. We then used ratings of the incomplete information conditions to predict ratings of the original video condition. Impressions in the audio track condition were strong predictors throughout all trait ratings. However, other cues were also non-negligible contributors to an overall impression. People even make sense of parsimonious cues, e.g., an animated stick-figure. Thus, presenters on a public stage are not only judged by what they say but also by how they move.     

Change blindness in the absence of a visual disruption

Findings from studies of visual memory and change detection have revealed a surprising inability to detect large changes to scenes from one view to the next ('change blindness'). When some form of disruption is introduced between an original and modified display, observers often fail to notice the change. This disruption can take many forms (e.g. an eye movement, a flashed blank screen, a blink, a cut in a motion picture, etc) with similar results. In all cases, the changes are sufficiently large that, were they to occur instantaneously, they would consistently be detected. Prior research on change blindness was predicated on the assumption that, in the absence of a visual disruption, the signal caused by the change would draw attention, leading to detection. In two experiments, we demonstrate that change blindness can occur even in the absence of a visual disruption. In one experiment, subjects actually detected more changes with a disruption than without one. When changes are sufficiently gradual, the visible change signal does not seem to draw attention, and large changes can go undetected. The findings are discussed in the context of metacognitive beliefs about change detection and the strategic decisions those beliefs entail.     

Watching Aggressive, Attractive, Female Protagonists Shapes Gender Roles for Women Among Male and Female Undergraduate Viewers

The impact of exposure to media representations of aggressive, attractive, female protagonists on audiences?? gender role expectations for women was explored through a laboratory experiment with 122 undergraduates from a large university on the west coast of the United States. Participants viewed a segment of a major Hollywood motion picture that featured a female protagonist who was either highly attractive or less attractive and either highly aggressive or not aggressive. Viewing clips featuring a female protagonist who was both aggressive and stereotypically attractive led to greater endorsement of stereotypically feminine and stereotypically masculine gender role expectations for women. The effect on endorsement of stereotypically masculine expectations was partially mediated by the perception that the protagonist was a good role model for women. Although women endorsed both feminine and masculine gender role expectations for women more strongly than men, the effects of exposure to aggressive, attractive, female protagonists were similar for both male and female participants. Results are discussed in terms of gender stereotype activation and superwoman expectations for women.     

Eliciting emotion ratings for a set of film clips: A preliminary archive for research in emotion

ABSTRACT

Film clips are commonly used to elicit subjectively experienced emotional states for many research purposes, but film clips currently available in databases are out of date, include a limited set of emotions, and/or pertain to only one conceptualization of emotion. This work reports validation data from two studies aimed to elicit basic and complex emotions (amusement, anger, anxiety, compassion, contentment, disgust, fear, happiness/joy, irritation, neutrality, pride, relief, sadness, surprise), equally distributed according to valence (positive, negative) and intensity (high, low). Participants rated film clips according to the degree of experienced emotion, and for valence and arousal. Our findings initiate an iterative archive of film clips shown here to discretely elicit 11 different emotions. Although further validation of these film clips is needed, ratings provided here should assist researchers in selecting potential film clips to meet the aims of their work.     

A standardised database of Chinese emotional film clips

Film clips are widely used in emotion research due to their relatively high ecological validity. Although researchers have established various film clip sets for different cultures, the few that exist related to Chinese culture do not adequately address positive emotions. The main purposes of the present study were to establish a standardised database of Chinese emotional film clips that could elicit more categories of reported positive emotions compared to the existing databases and to expand the available film clips that can be used as neutral materials. Two experiments were conducted to construct the database. In experiment 1, 111 film clips were selected from more than one thousand Chinese movies for preliminary screening. After 315 participants viewed and evaluated these film clips, 39 excerpts were selected for further validation. In experiment 2, 147 participants watched and rated these 39 film clips, as well as another 8 excerpts chosen from the existing databases, to compare their validity. Eventually, 22 film excerpts that successfully evoked three positive emotions (joy, amusement, and tenderness), four negative emotions (moral disgust, anger, fear, and sadness), and neutrality formed the standardised database of Chinese emotional film clips.     

Eliciting positive,negative and mixed emotional states: A film library for affective scientists

We describe the creation of a film library designed for researchers interested in positive (amusing), negative (repulsive), mixed (amusing and repulsive) and neutral emotional states. Three hundred 20- to 33-second film clips videotaped by amateurs were selected from video-hosting websites and screened in laboratory studies by 75 female participants on self-reported amusement and repulsion (Experiments 1 and 2). On the basis of pre-defined cut-off values, 51 positive, 39 negative, 59 mixed and 50 neutral film clips were selected. These film clips were then presented to 411 male and female participants in a large online study to identify film clips that reliably induced the target emotions (Experiment 3). Depending on the goal of the study, researchers may choose positive, negative, mixed or neutral emotional film clips on the basis of Experiments 1 and 2 or Experiment 3 ratings.     

A film set for the elicitation of emotion in research: A comprehensive catalog derived from four decades of investigation

Emotions are highly influential to many psychological processes. Indeed, research employing emotional stimuli is rapidly escalating across the field of psychology. However, challenges remain regarding discrete evocation of frequently co-elicited emotions such as amusement and happiness, or anger and disgust. Further, as much contemporary work in emotion employs college students, we sought to additionally evaluate the efficacy of film clips to discretely elicit these more challenging emotions in a young adult population using an online medium. The internet is an important tool for investigating responses to emotional stimuli, but validations of emotionally evocative film clips across laboratory and web-based settings are limited in the literature. An additional obstacle is identifying stimuli amidst the numerous film clip validation studies. During our investigation, we recognized the lack of a categorical database to facilitate rapid identification of useful film clips for individual researchers’ unique investigations. Consequently, here we also sought to produce the first compilation of such stimuli into an accessible and comprehensive catalog. We based our catalog upon prior work as well as our own, and identified 24 articles and 295 film clips from four decades of research. We present information on the validation of these clips in addition to our own research validating six clips using online administration settings. The results of our search in the literature and our own study are presented in tables designed to facilitate and improve a selection of highly valid film stimuli for future research.     

Inattentional blindness for a noxious multimodal stimulus

Previous research has shown that people can miss salient stimuli outside the focus of their attention. This phenomenon, called inattentional blindness, typically is observed when people are given a task requiring them to focus their attention on one aspect of a complex visual scene. While participants are doing this task, an unexpected stimulus appears, and participants' awareness of it is tested shortly thereafter. In the present experiments, noxious bimodal stimuli were used as a test case to measure the strength of inattentional blindness. We tested whether participants would notice a person enter a scene and scratch her fingernails down a chalkboard (thus making a sound called a "gride"). A large proportion of participants failed to detect this event even when the noxious audio associated with it was strengthened and isolated in time from surrounding noises.     

Notes on Pavlov written while I was in Russia (1922–1927)

Editors Note—Shortly before Dr. Gantt died, he gave me the following notes that he wrote on Pavlov with the suggestion that I might edit and publish them at some time. Instead of editing them, I think these notes as they are are touching and close to both Gantt and Pavlov. They are reproduced here with only very minor, typographical corrections.—FJM