Watching a film is like being caught in the mesmerizing grip of a magician’s spell. The enchanting power of motion on the silver screen captivates our attention, making us gaze intently at every movement. But what if I told you that motion might not be the only factor at play? In a groundbreaking study, scientists investigated whether the ‘tyranny of film,’ where viewers pay attention to a movie regardless of external influences, is driven solely by motion. To tackle this mystery, they conducted an experiment using a slideshow presentation of an iconic film scene: Touch of Evil’s opening sequence. Some participants saw the full slideshow with context, while others were deprived of the crucial opening portion showing someone planting a time bomb. Surprisingly, when the scene was shown as a film, both groups fixated on the car with the bomb equally. However, when the scene was presented as a slideshow, differences in attentional selection emerged. The manipulation of context affected viewers’ gaze, attenuating attentional synchrony. This suggests that context and motion both influence our attention while watching films, and it opens up exciting possibilities for further exploration into how narratives shape our visual experiences. To dive deeper into this fascinating research, check out the link below!

Abstract
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.

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