What Would Jaws Do? The Tyranny of Film and the Relationship between Gaze and Higher-Level Narrative Film Comprehension

Abstract

What is the relationship between film viewers’ eye movements and their film comprehension? Typical Hollywood movies induce strong attentional synchrony—most viewers look at the same things at the same time. Thus, we asked whether film viewers’ eye movements would differ based on their understanding—the mental model hypothesis—or whether any such differences would be overwhelmed by viewers’ attentional synchrony—the tyranny of film hypothesis. To investigate this question, we manipulated the presence/absence of prior film context and measured resulting differences in film comprehension and eye movements. Viewers watched a 12-second James Bond movie clip, ending just as a critical predictive inference should be drawn that Bond’s nemesis, “Jaws,” would fall from the sky onto a circus tent. The No-context condition saw only the 12-second clip, but the Context condition also saw the preceding 2.5 minutes of the movie before seeing the critical 12-second portion. Importantly, the Context condition viewers were more likely to draw the critical inference and were more likely to perceive coherence across the entire 6 shot sequence (as shown by event segmentation), indicating greater comprehension. Viewers’ eye movements showed strong attentional synchrony in both conditions as compared to a chance level baseline, but smaller differences between conditions. Specifically, the Context condition viewers showed slightly, but significantly, greater attentional synchrony and lower cognitive load (as shown by fixation probability) during the critical first circus tent shot. Thus, overall, the results were more consistent with the tyranny of film hypothesis than the mental model hypothesis. These results suggest the need for a theory that encompasses processes from the perception to the comprehension of film.

Watching More Closely: Shot Scale Affects Film Viewers’ Theory of Mind Tendency But Not Ability

“…It seems that emotional words in printed media have similar function to emotional faces in visual media. Furthermore, filmmakers are skilled in their ability to direct attention toward such important social cues (Loschky et al, 2015; Cutting and Armstrong, 2016). …”

Understanding Moment‐to‐Moment Processing of Visual Narratives

“…This is as opposed to a volitional top-down process. Our own prior studies have shown only weak effects of the viewer's event model on their attentional selection in the domain of viewing film clips (Hutson, Smith, Magliano, & Loschky, 2017;Loschky, Larson, Magliano, & Smith, 2015). Thus, our goal in this study is to better understand the processes involved in generating bridging inferences in visual narratives involving eye movements and, in doing so, test a novel hypothesis from SPECT.…”

Distinct neural mechanisms of social orienting and mentalizing revealed by independent measures of neural and eye movement typicality

“…Of the remaining 62, a subset of 36 males were chosen to match the ASD group, based on gender, age, IQ and motion. Mean age for the matched TD group was 20.8 (range [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. For the eye movement analyses, three participants from the ASD group and two from the TD group were excluded for failing to achieve adequate calibration on the eye tracker.…”

“…This creates a movie experience which is robustly shared across viewers, with previous studies describing widespread correlations in neural responses across individuals, extending well beyond perceptual regions into social processing areas, among others 14 . This attentional synchrony however, seems to be dominated by transient visual and social cues, and is only very weakly modulated by higher level comprehension of the narrative, or inferences based on the mental states of the characters in the scene, as is demonstrated by studies which manipulated comprehension through temporal shuffling of scenes 15 , or manipulation of available context 16,17 .…”