Match-Action: The Role of Motion and Audio in Creating Global Change Blindness in Film

An everyday example of change blindness is our difficulty to detect cuts in an edited moving-image. Edit blindness (Smith & Henderson, 2008) is created by adhering to the continuity editing conventions of Hollywood, for example, coinciding a cut with a sudden onset of motion (match-action). In this study, we isolated the roles motion and audio play in limiting awareness of match-action cuts by removing motion before and/or after cuts in existing Hollywood film clips and presenting the clips with or without the original soundtrack whilst participants tried to detect cuts. Removing post-cut motion significantly decreased cut detection time and the probability of missing the cut. By comparison, removing pre-cut motion had no effect suggesting, contrary to the editing literature, that the onset of motion before a cut may not be as critical for creating edit blindness as the motion after a cut. Analysis of eye movements indicated that viewers reoriented less to new content across intact match-action cuts than shots with motion removed. Audio played a surprisingly large part in creating edit blindness with edit blindness mostly disappearing without audio. These results extend film editor intuitions and are discussed in the context of the Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (Smith, 2012a).