Department of Learning Sciences, Georgia State University.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University.
Cogn Sci. 2022 May;46(5):e13131. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13131.
Viewers' attentional selection while looking at scenes is affected by both top-down and bottom-up factors. However, when watching film, viewers typically attend to the movie similarly irrespective of top-down factors-a phenomenon we call the tyranny of film. A key difference between still pictures and film is that film contains motion, which is a strong attractor of attention and highly predictive of gaze during film viewing. The goal of the present study was to test if the tyranny of film is driven by motion. To do this, we created a slideshow presentation of the opening scene of Touch of Evil. Context condition participants watched the full slideshow. No-context condition participants did not see the opening portion of the scene, which showed someone placing a time bomb into the trunk of a car. In prior research, we showed that despite producing very different understandings of the clip, this manipulation did not affect viewers' attention (i.e., the tyranny of film), as both context and no-context participants were equally likely to fixate on the car with the bomb when the scene was presented as a film. The current study found that when the scene was shown as a slideshow, the context manipulation produced differences in attentional selection (i.e., it attenuated attentional synchrony). We discuss these results in the context of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory, which specifies the relationship between event comprehension and attentional selection in the context of visual narratives.
观看场景时，观众的注意力选择受到自上而下和自下而上因素的影响。然而，在观看电影时，观众通常会忽略自上而下的因素，关注电影——这种现象我们称之为电影的暴政。静止图像和电影之间的一个关键区别在于，电影包含运动，运动是注意力的强大吸引力，并且高度预测电影观看过程中的注视。本研究的目的是测试电影的暴政是否由运动驱动。为此，我们制作了《触目惊心》开场场景的幻灯片演示。在上下文条件下，参与者观看了完整的幻灯片。在无上下文条件下，参与者没有看到场景的开场部分，该部分显示有人将定时炸弹放入汽车后备箱。在之前的研究中，我们表明，尽管这种操纵产生了对剪辑的非常不同的理解，但并没有影响观众的注意力（即电影的暴政），因为当场景作为电影呈现时，上下文和无上下文参与者都同样有可能将注意力集中在装有炸弹的汽车上。当前的研究发现，当场景以幻灯片形式呈现时，上下文操作会产生注意力选择的差异（即，它会减弱注意力的同步性）。我们在场景感知和事件理解理论的背景下讨论这些结果，该理论指定了视觉叙事中事件理解和注意力选择之间的关系。
