Film Cognition
What is going on in the mind of a viewer when they watch an audiovisual narrative? Film and TV evolved formal techniques to minimise the effort involved in processing their highly unnatural flow of sensory information. Here we study cinematic techniques such as cinematography, editing, and sound design as well as their moment-by-moment influences on cognition and emotion to both understand why film evolved the way it did and what this tells us about how we process real-world dynamic scenes.
Our work into film cognition tackles many aspects including film literacy, the role of sound, narrative comprehension and edit blindness. But a large part of our work has focussed on the perception of continuity across edited film sequences and how we can use eye tracking as a window into the real-time cognition occurring during film viewing. All of these areas are covered in our publications below but for a quick overview of these two main areas first check out these publications:
-
Smith, Tim J. (2012) The attentional theory of cinematic continuity. Projections 6 (1), pp. 1-27. ISSN 1934-9688.
-
Smith, Tim J. (2013) Watching you watch movies: using eye tracking to inform film theory. In: Shimamura, A (ed.) Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies. New York, U.S.: Oxford University Press, pp. 165-191. ISBN 9780199862139.
For on-going ramblings on this topic check out Dr. Tim J. Smith's research blog, Continuity Boy.
Introductory Videos on Film Cognition
You can find a video lecture introducing our work on Film Cognition presented as part of the Zurcher Dokumentarfilmtagung (ZDOK; Documentary Film Workshop) in Zurich on 22nd March, 2018 here:
Demo Videos & Resources
Other demo videos and film/eye movement corpora:
-
Blade Runner -
There Will Be Blood: Gaze Heatmaps and Blog
Key Publications
Ildirar Kirbas, Sermin and Smith, Tim J. (2018) How infants perceive animated films. In: Uhrig, M. (ed.) Emotion in Animated Films. Routledge Advances in Film Studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9781138303287.
External Links
The Society for Cognitiive Studies of The Moving Image (SCSMI) and associated Facebook group.