These results further our understanding of how filmmakers’ and viewers’ goals both shape viewer experience. ![]() However, conscious control of one’s attention by a task at odds with comprehending the narrative more strongly guides attention. Our study shows that when viewers watch mainstream movies their visual attention is only modestly affected by differences in narrative comprehension. This is of critical importance, because although where a person looks and their understanding are highly correlated, if a film viewer has little control over where they look this relationship may be weaker. But, the contribution of online top-down cognitive factors, such as comprehension and viewing task, that are known to have large effects on eye movements during reading and static scene viewing are poorly understood for films. Does film work the way filmmakers think it does? Highly produced mainstream films have been empirically shown to guide viewers to look at the same places at the same time and the association between gaze location and bottom-up visual salience has been reliably computationally modeled. However, these intuitions have rarely been empirically validated. One potential reason for this is the filmmaking techniques for creating highly systematic viewing experiences that filmmakers have intuitively developed and believe to be highly effective. The evidence provided by this experimental case study suggests that filmmakers’ belief in their ability to create systematic gaze behavior across viewers is confirmed, but that this does not indicate universally similar comprehension of the film narrative.įilm, television, and video are ubiquitous, and viewers of these media generally have similar narrative experiences despite the complexity of the audiovisual stimuli and large individual differences across viewers. Thus, to allow for strong, volitional top-down control of eye movements in film, task manipulations need to make features that are important to narrative comprehension irrelevant to the viewing task. This task manipulation created large differences in eye movements when compared to participants freely viewing the clip for comprehension. To amplify top-down effects on eye movements, a task manipulation was designed to prioritize peripheral scene features: a map task. Overall, the manipulation created large differences in comprehension, but only produced modest differences in eye movements. ![]() To investigate the effects of comprehension on eye movements during film viewing, we manipulated viewers’ comprehension by starting participants at different points in a film, and then tracked their eyes. Comprehension differences were compared with more volitionally controlled task-based effects on eye movements. ![]() Thus, in two experiments we tested whether the eye movements and comprehension relationship similarly held in a classic film example, the famous opening scene of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (Welles & Zugsmith, Touch of Evil, 1958). Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye movements and comprehension, and scene perception studies have shown strong effects of viewing tasks on eye movements, but such idiosyncratic top-down control of gaze in film would be anathema to the universal control mainstream filmmakers typically aim for. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bottom-up) or the viewer (top-down) is more important in determining how we watch movies. Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers’ attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood.
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