Lights,camera, action: the role of editing and framing on the processing of filmed events

ABSTRACT

Filmmakers use various cinematic techniques in an effort to guide attention to certain aspects of these events. The present study was conducted to investigate how framing and editing can guide viewers’ attention toward character actions during event segmentation. Participants watched and segmented a movie that simultaneously showed two actors engaged in two related activities. Participants watched one of three versions of the movie: Static center version that did not foreground any character; Static off-center version that foregrounding one of the characters, and an edited version with a mix of shots that foregrounding both characters. Participants engaged in an event partonomy task in which they were asked to identify the boundaries between the events that were depicted in the movie. After watching the movie, they were asked to recall the events. The results showed converging evidence between the event segmentation and recall data, which both indicated that cinematic devices affect the perception and memory of the event structure depicted in the film.     

Do we make decisions for other people based on our predictions of their preferences? evidence from financial and medical scenarios involving risk

Abstract

The ways in which the decisions we make for others differ from the ones we make for ourselves has received much attention in the literature, although less is known about their relationship to our predictions of the recipient’s preferences. The latter question is of particular importance given real-world occurrences of surrogate decision-making which require surrogates to consider the recipient’s preferences. We conducted three experiments which explore this relationship in the medical and financial domains. Although there were mean discrepancies between surrogate predictions and choices, we identified a predictive relationship between the two. Moreover, when participants took high risks for themselves, it seems that they were not willing to do so for others, even when they believed that the recipient’s preferences were similar to their own. We discuss these findings relative to current theories and real-world instances of surrogate decision-making.