Which perceptual and cognitive prerequisites must be met in order to be able to comprehend a film is still unresolved and a controversial issue. In order to gain some insights into this issue, our field experiment investigates how first-time adult viewers extract and integrate meaningful information across film cuts. Three major types of commonalities between adjacent shots were differentiated, which may help first-time viewers with bridging the shots: pictorial, causal, and conceptual. Twenty first-time, 20 low-experienced and 20 high-experienced viewers from Turkey were shown a set of short film clips containing these three kinds of commonalities. Film clips conformed also to the principles of continuity editing. Analyses of viewers' spontaneous interpretations show that first-time viewers indeed are able to notice basic pictorial (object identity), causal (chains of activity), as well as conceptual (links between gaze direction and object attention) commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. However, first-time viewers' comprehension of the commonalities is to a large degree fragile, indicating the lack of a basic notion of what constitutes a film.

Although film, television, and video play an important role in modern societies, the extent to which the similarities of cinematographic images to natural, unmediated conditions of visual experience contribute to viewers' comprehension is largely an open question. To address this question, we compared 20 inexperienced adult viewers from southern Turkey with groups of medium- and high-experienced adult viewers from the same region. In individual sessions, each participant was shown a set of 14 film clips that included a number of perceptual discontinuities typical for film. The viewers' interpretations were recorded and analyzed. The findings show that it is not the similarity to conditions of natural perception but the presence of a familiar line of action that determines the comprehensibility of films for inexperienced viewers. In the absence of such a line of action, extended prior experience is required for appropriate interpretation of cinematographic images such as those we investigated in this study.

Researchers have recently suggested that historically mixed findings in studies of the Kuleshov effect (a classic film editing-related phenomenon whereby meaning is extracted from the interaction of sequential camera shots) might reflect differences in the relative sophistication of early versus modern cinema audiences. Relative to experienced audiences, first-time film viewers might be less predisposed and/or able to forge the required conceptual and perceptual links between the edited shots in order to demonstrate the effect. This article recreates the conditions that traditionally elicit this effect (whereby a neutral face comes to be perceived as expressive after being juxtaposed with independent images: a bowl of soup, a gravestone, a child playing) to directly compare "continuity" perception in first-time and more experienced film viewers. Results confirm the presence of the Kuleshov effect for experienced viewers (explicitly only in the sadness condition) but not the first-time viewers, who failed to perceive continuity between the shots.

Previous studies concluded that first-time film viewers often had difficulty integrating shots into a coherent representation of the depicted events in the absence of a familiar action through the film cuts or a salient eye-gazing of a character in the film. In this study, we investigated whether diegetic sound (i.e., sound that seems to originate from the depicted cinematic space) could effectively bridge shots for first-time viewers. Across a range of films, both dialog, and salient environmental sound (e.g., barking dogs) helped first-time viewers connect shots. However, sound was not always successful in supporting first-time viewers' interpretations. While experienced viewers were able to understand less-familiar linking sounds and environments, first-time viewers found this difficult. Overall, a range of diegetic sounds helped first-time viewers understand spatiotemporal relations between shots, but these viewers still had difficulty integrating views of unfamiliar environments.