Do film cuts facilitate the perceptual and cognitive organization of activitiy sequences?
- 1 March 2000
- journal article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Memory & Cognition
- Vol. 28 (2), 214-223
- https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03213801
Abstract
Film depictions of activities possess two kinds of structures—namely, the structural features of the depicted activities themselves and a formal structure defined by film cuts. The former structure is used by everyday observers for perceptually and cognitively unitizing the continuous flow of events into comprehensible entities. It seems conceivable that cuts can serve a similar unitizing purpose for film viewers. For each of two different activity sequences, two film versions were produced. Throughout each film version, cuts were placed either at breakpoints or at nonbreakpoints. In a 2 × 2 (activity sequence × film version) factorial design, 40 subjects segmentation behavior depended primarily on the occurrence of breakpoints and was largely unaffected by the occurrence of cuts. Cuts accompanying a breakpoint lead to more detailed recall protocols for these sections of the film.Keywords
This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit:
- The relationship between formal filmic means and the segmentation behavior of film viewersJournal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 1998
- Exploration of the Detectable Structure of Social Episodes: The Parsing of Interaction SpecimensEcological Psychology, 1993
- PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computersBehavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 1993
- The Effects of Related and Unrelated Cuts on Television Viewers' Attention, Processing Capacity, and MemoryCommunication Research, 1993
- Visually Based Descriptions of an Everyday ActionEcological Psychology, 1992
- The role of cutting in the evaluation and retention of film.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1986
- The cognitive representation of an event involving human motionCognitive Psychology, 1981
- The objective basis of behavior units.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1977
- The perceptual organization of ongoing behaviorJournal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1976
- Segmentation in Cinema PerceptionScience, 1976