Bridging views in cinema: a review of the art and science of view integration

Eye Movements during Dynamic Scene Viewing are Affected by Visual Attention Skills and Events of the Scene: Evidence from First-Person Shooter Gameplay Videos

The role of individual differences during dynamic scene viewing was explored. Participants (N=38) watched a gameplay video of a first-person shooter (FPS) videogame while their eye movements were recorded. In addition, the participants’ skills in three visual attention tasks (attentional blink, visual search, and multiple object tracking) were assessed. The results showed that individual differences in visual attention tasks were associated with eye movement patterns observed during viewing of the gameplay video. The differences were noted in four eye movement measures: number of fixations, fixation durations, saccade amplitudes and fixation distances from the center of the screen. The individual differences showed during specific events of the video as well as during the video as a whole. The results highlight that an unedited, fast-paced and cluttered dynamic scene can bring about individual differences in dynamic scene viewing.

Co-Imagination of Fictional Worlds in Film Viewing

The typical experience of narrative film is characterized by a remarkable intensity as to absorption and emotion. Current explanations attribute the experience to the realistic perceptual impact of the film. This theoretical article sets out to explain the experience as the result first of the film-viewer's acts of imagination of fictional worlds. More specifically, it seems suitable to conceptualize the film experience as arising from pretense play. Pretense play can afford room for free imagination leading to intense emotion, as well as restrictions to the imagination “quarantining” ( Leslie, 1987 ) pretended fictional worlds from the real world, thus safeguarding the enjoyability and adaptiveness of the experience. Applying the concept of joint pretense for the first time to film, we follow Walton (1990) in his account of fiction as an institutionalized form of pretense play enabling intense emotional experiences in the cinema, including unpleasant ones to be appreciated by film-viewers. Thus, the model of co-imagination has as components (a) the generation of fictional film worlds—the acts of pretense in the narrower sense; (b) the participation in; and (c) the appreciation of these. We argue that the account of the experience can be improved if it is conceived as the outcome of joint pretense, in which film-viewers in their imagination activity team up with filmmakers—experts by eminence in prompting the viewers’ imagination. Finally, in our model of co-imagination in popular film joint pretense acts are layered ( Clark, 1996 ) as to the contents of the fictional worlds, with the lowest layer representing the collaboration for imagination between filmmaker and film-viewer in the actual world and the higher ones representing fictional worlds of increasing depth of imagination. Because of asymmetric access relations among layers, returns to the actual world in advanced pretense are difficult, which helps quarantining and the sense of absorption.

Temporal fractals in movies and mind

Fractal patterns are seemingly everywhere. They can be analyzed through Fourier and power analyses, and other methods. Cutting, DeLong, and Nothelfer (2010) analyzed as time-series data the fluctuations of shot durations in 150 popular movies released over 70 years. They found that these patterns had become increasingly fractal-like and concluded that they might be linked to those found in the results of psychological tasks involving attention. To explore this possibility further, we began by analyzing the shot patterns of almost twice as many movies released over a century. The increasing fractal-like nature of shot patterns is affirmed, as determined by both a slope measure and a long-range dependence measure, neither of which is sensitive to the vector lengths of their inputs within the ranges explored here. But the main reason for increased long-range dependence is related to, but not caused by, the increasing vector length of the shot-series samples. It appears that, in generating increasingly fractal-like patterns, filmmakers have systematically explored dimensions that are important for holding our attention-shot durations, scene durations, motion, and sound amplitude-and have crafted fluctuations in them like those of our endogenous attention patterns. Other dimensions-luminance, clutter, and shot scale-are important to film style but their variations seem not to be important to holding viewers' moment-to-moment attention and have not changed in their fractional dimension over time.

Audio Facilitates the Perception of Cinematic Continuity by First-Time Viewers

Previous studies concluded that first-time film viewers often had difficulty integrating shots into a coherent representation of the depicted events in the absence of a familiar action through the film cuts or a salient eye-gazing of a character in the film. In this study, we investigated whether diegetic sound (i.e., sound that seems to originate from the depicted cinematic space) could effectively bridge shots for first-time viewers. Across a range of films, both dialog, and salient environmental sound (e.g., barking dogs) helped first-time viewers connect shots. However, sound was not always successful in supporting first-time viewers' interpretations. While experienced viewers were able to understand less-familiar linking sounds and environments, first-time viewers found this difficult. Overall, a range of diegetic sounds helped first-time viewers understand spatiotemporal relations between shots, but these viewers still had difficulty integrating views of unfamiliar environments.