Large-scale narrative events in popular cinema.

Most experiments in event perception and cognition have focused on events that are only a few minutes in length, and the previous research on popular movies is consistent with this temporal scope. Scenes are generally between a few seconds and a few minutes in duration. But popular movies also offer an opportunity to explore larger events-variously called acts, major parts, or large-scale parts by film theorists-in which the boundaries often have few if any unique physical attributes. These units tend to be between about 20 to 35 min in duration. The present study had observers watch seven movies they had not seen before and, over the course of several days and with ample justifications, reflect on them, and then segment them into two to six parts with the aid of a running description of the narrative. Results showed consistency across viewers' segmentations, consistency with film-theoretic segmentations, and superiority over internet subjects who had access to only the scenarios used by the movie viewers. Thus, these results suggest that there are large scale events in movies; they support a view that their events are organized meronomically, layered with units of different sizes and with boundaries shared across layers; and they suggest that these larger-scale events can be discerned through cognitive, not perceptual, means.

Sequences in popular cinema generate inconsistent event segmentation.

Popular movies have an event structure that includes scenes and sequences. Scenes are fashioned to be perceived as smoothly flowing, a feature called continuity. Discontinuity is said to occur when scene (event) boundaries are crossed. This article focuses on the structure and perception of sequences that have subscenes (i.e., scene-like components) but whose boundaries, unlike those of scenes, tend to demonstrate some perceived continuity. Although the structure of sequences has been addressed by film theory, this topic has not received psychological attention. Here, data are used from viewer judgments and physical measurements of 24 popular movies, released from 1940 to 2010. Each film was inspected for narrative shift patterns-that is, changes in location, character, or time-across shots. Sequences were determined by repeated shift types, common sound coverage, and the shorter durations of subscenes than of scenes. By these criteria, sequences have increased in movies over time. The results also show that viewer judgments of event boundaries diminish in the presence of music and of shorter and less modulated shot durations. These results fit snugly within event segmentation theory, and this categorization of movie sequences by narrative shifts can accommodate previous accounts of sequence structure.

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.

Cryptic Emotions and the Emergence of a Metatheory of Mind in Popular Filmmaking.

Hollywood movies can be deeply engaging and easy to understand. To succeed in this manner, feature-length movies employ many editing techniques with strong psychological underpinnings. We explore the origins and development of one of these, the reaction shot. This shot typically shows a single, unspeaking character with modest facial expression in response to an event or to the behavior or speech of another character. In a sample of movies from 1940 to 2010, we show that the prevalence of one type of these shots-which we call the cryptic reaction shot-has grown dramatically. These shots are designed to enhance viewers' emotional involvement with characters. They depict a facial gesture that reflects a slightly negative and slightly aroused emotional state. Their use at the end of conversations, and typically at the end of scenes, helps to leave viewers in a state of speculation about what the character is thinking and what her thoughts may mean for the ongoing narrative.

Considering the filmmaker: Intensified continuity, narrative structure, and the Distancing-Embracing model.

Menninghaus et al. pose two open-ended questions: To what extent do formal elements of art elicit negative affect, and do artists try to elicit this response in a theory-based or intuitive manner? For popular movies, we argue that the consideration of their construction is prior to the consideration of the experience that they evoke.

Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies.

Popular movies grab and hold our attention. One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. The result is a highly effective format that allows rapid processing of complex narratives. Using a corpus analysis I explore a physical narratology of popular movies-narrational structure and how it impacts us-to promote a theory of popular movie form. I show that movies can be divided into 4 acts-setup, complication, development, and climax-with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points. In 12 studies I show that normative aspects in patterns of shot durations, shot transitions, shot scale, shot motion, shot luminance, character introduction, and distributions of conversations, music, action shots, and scene transitions reduce to 5 correlated stylistic dimensions of movies and can litigate among theories of movie structure. In general, movie narratives have roughly the same structure as narratives in any other domain-plays, novels, manga, folktales, even oral histories-but with particular runtime constraints, cadences, and constructions that are unique to the medium.

Facial expression, size, and clutter: Inferences from movie structure to emotion judgments and back.

The perception of facial expressions and objects at a distance are entrenched psychological research venues, but their intersection is not. We were motivated to study them together because of their joint importance in the physical composition of popular movies-shots that show a larger image of a face typically have shorter durations than those in which the face is smaller. For static images, we explore the time it takes viewers to categorize the valence of different facial expressions as a function of their visual size. In two studies, we find that smaller faces take longer to categorize than those that are larger, and this pattern interacts with local background clutter. More clutter creates crowding and impedes the interpretation of expressions for more distant faces but not proximal ones. Filmmakers at least tacitly know this. In two other studies, we show that contemporary movies lengthen shots that show smaller faces, and even more so with increased clutter.

The evolution of pace in popular movies.

Movies have changed dramatically over the last 100 years. Several of these changes in popular English-language filmmaking practice are reflected in patterns of film style as distributed over the length of movies. In particular, arrangements of shot durations, motion, and luminance have altered and come to reflect aspects of the narrative form. Narrative form, on the other hand, appears to have been relatively unchanged over that time and is often characterized as having four more or less equal duration parts, sometimes called acts - setup, complication, development, and climax. The altered patterns in film style found here affect a movie's pace: increasing shot durations and decreasing motion in the setup, darkening across the complication and development followed by brightening across the climax, decreasing shot durations and increasing motion during the first part of the climax followed by increasing shot durations and decreasing motion at the end of the climax. Decreasing shot durations mean more cuts; more cuts mean potentially more saccades that drive attention; more motion also captures attention; and brighter and darker images are associated with positive and negative emotions. Coupled with narrative form, all of these may serve to increase the engagement of the movie viewer.

Perception, as you make it.

The main question that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) pose is whether "what and how we see is functionally independent from what and how we think, know, desire, act, and so forth" (sect. 2, para. 1). We synthesize a collection of concerns from an interdisciplinary set of coauthors regarding F&S's assumptions and appeals to intuition, resulting in their treatment of visual perception as context-free.

Event segmentation and seven types of narrative discontinuity in popular movies.

Using a sample of 24 movies I investigate narrative shifts in location, characters, and time frame that do and do not align with viewer segmentations of events (scenes and subscenes) in popular movies. Taken independently these dimensions create eight categories, seven of change and one of nonchange. Data show that the more dimensions that are changed the more viewers agree on their segmentations, although the nonadditive variations across the seven change types are large and systematic. Dissolves aid segmentation but over the last 70 years they have been used less and less by filmmakers, except for two infrequent shift types. Locations and characters are strongly yoked, jointly accounting for most narrative shifts. There are also interactions of shift types over the 70-year span and across genres, as well as differences that affect the scale of the establishing shot in a new scene. In addition, several aspects of the narratives of individual movies affect the distributions of shift types. Together these results suggest that there are at least four different signatures of narrative shifts to be found in popular movies - general patterns across time, patterns of historical change, genre-specific patterns, and film-specific patterns.

Ulric Neisser (1928-2012).

Presents an obituary for Ulric Neisser. Neisser changed the course of psychology. He moved a generation of psychologists in the direction of the field named by his first book, Cognitive Psychology (1967, Appleton-Century-Crofts). He then challenged that field with his later book Cognition and Reality (1976, W. H. Freeman). Finally, he explored cracks in the received wisdom within the fields of attention, memory, and intelligence through a distinguished array of edited volumes and provocative articles. Throughout his life, he made a marriage between belief in discovered truth and complete skepticism by means of a passionate, serial monogamy of ideas. He died on February 17, 2012, at age 83 of complications from Parkinson's disease. His many honors included election as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Perceiving event dynamics and parsing Hollywood films.

We selected 24 Hollywood movies released from 1940 through 2010 to serve as a film corpus. Eight viewers, three per film, parsed them into events, which are best termed subscenes. While watching a film a second time, viewers scrolled through frames and recorded the frame number where each event began. Viewers agreed about 90% of the time. We then analyzed the data as a function of a number of visual variables: shot transitions, shot duration, shot scale, motion, luminance, and color across shots within and across events, and a code that noted changes in place or time. We modeled viewer parsings across all shots of each film and found that, as an ensemble, the visual variables accounted for about 30% of the variance in the data, even without considering the soundtrack. Adding a code recording place and/or time change increases this variance to about 50%. We conclude that there is ample perceptual information for viewers to parse films into events without necessarily considering the intentions and goals of the actors, although these are certainly needed to understand the story of the film.

Quicker, faster, darker: Changes in Hollywood film over 75 years.

We measured 160 English-language films released from 1935 to 2010 and found four changes. First, shot lengths have gotten shorter, a trend also reported by others. Second, contemporary films have more motion and movement than earlier films. Third, in contemporary films shorter shots also have proportionately more motion than longer shots, whereas there is no such relation in older films. And finally films have gotten darker. That is, the mean luminance value of frames across the length of a film has decreased over time. We discuss psychological effects associated with these four changes and suggest that all four linear trends have a single cause: Filmmakers have incrementally tried to exercise more control over the attention of filmgoers. We suggest these changes are signatures of the evolution of popular film; they do not reflect changes in film style.

Attention and the evolution of Hollywood film.

Reaction times exhibit a spectral patterning known as 1/f, and these patterns can be thought of as reflecting time-varying changes in attention. We investigated the shot structure of Hollywood films to determine if these same patterns are found. We parsed 150 films with release dates from 1935 to 2005 into their sequences of shots and then analyzed the pattern of shot lengths in each film. Autoregressive and power analyses showed that, across that span of 70 years, shots became increasingly more correlated in length with their neighbors and created power spectra approaching 1/f. We suggest, as have others, that 1/f patterns reflect world structure and mental process. Moreover, a 1/f temporal shot structure may help harness observers' attention to the narrative of a film.

Gustave Caillebotte, French impressionism, and mere exposure.

Gustave Caillebotte was a painter, a collector of some of his colleagues' most renowned works, and a major force in the creation of the late 19th century French Impressionist canon. Six studies are presented as a naturalistic investigation of the effects of mere exposure to images in his collection and to those matched to them. The probabilities of cultural exposure to the 132 stimulus images were indexed by the frequencies of their separate appearances in Cornell University library books--a total of 4,232 times in 980 different books. Across the studies, adult preferences were correlated with differences in image frequencies, but not with recognition, complexity, or prototypicality judgments; children's preferences were not correlated with frequency. Prior cultural exposure also interacted with experimental exposure in predictable ways. The results suggest that mere exposure helps to maintain an artistic canon.

Representing motion in a static image: constraints and parallels in art, science, and popular culture.

Representing motion in a picture is a challenge to artists, scientists, and all other imagemakers. Moreover, it presents a problem that will not go away with electronic and digital media, because often the pedagogical purpose of the representation of motion is more important than the motion itself. All satisfactory solutions evoke motion-for example, dynamic balance (or broken symmetry), stroboscopic sequences, affine shear (or forward lean), and photographic blur-but they also typically sacrifice the accuracy of the motion represented, a solution often unsuitable for science. Vector representations superimposed on static images allow for accuracy, but are not applicable to all situations. Workable solutions are almost certainly case specific and subject to continual evolution through exploration by imagemakers.

Walking, looking to the side, and taking curved paths.

In two experiments, viewers judged heading from displays simulating locomotion through tree-filled environments, with gaze off to the side. They marked their heading with a mouse-controlled probe at three different depths. When simulated eye or head rotation generally exceeded 0.5 deg/sec, there was reliable curvature in perceived paths toward the fixated object. This curvature, however, was slight even with rotation rates as great as 2.6 deg/sec. Best-fit paths to circular arcs had radii of 1.8 km or greater. In a third experiment, pedestrians walked with matched gaze to the side. Measured curvature in the direction of gaze corresponded to a circular radius of about 1.3 km. Thus, at minimum, vision scientists need not worry about perceived path curvature in this situation; real path curvatures are about the same. However, at present, we can make no claim that the same mechanisms necessarily govern the two results.

Perceiving motion while moving: how pairwise nominal invariants make optical flow cohere.

Computer-generated sequences simulated observer movement toward 10 randomly placed poles, 1 moving and 9 stationary. When observers judged their direction of movement, or heading, they used 3 related invariants: The (a) convergence and (b) decelerating divergence of any 2 poles specified that heading was to the outside of the nearer pole, and the (c) crossover of 2 poles specified that heading was to the outside of the farther pole. With all poles stationary, the field of 45 pairwise movements yielded a coherent specification of heading. With I pole moving with respect to the others, however, the field could yield an incoherent heading solution. Such incoherence was readily detectable; similar pole motion leading to coherent flow, however, was less readily detectable.