Psych 1140.

102: FWS Perception Cognition & Development

Classroom exercise: Forming a research question

The following passages are taken from various research papers we have or will discuss in
the scope of this course. Read the following passages carefully and come up with the
research question/s that the authors are addressing in that particular passage:

In all previous studies of change blindness, exposure to scenes has been mediated via
photographs, computer displays, or television monitors. Perhaps people can more fully represent
the details of a scene when they are direct participants, interacting with the objects in the real
world. Here we assess this possibility by taking the study of change blindness into the real
world. (Simons & Levin, 1998, p. 645)

Only a few film theorists have questioned how the Continuity Editing Rules create edit
blindness. These theorists have provided a range of intriguing hypotheses that, on examination,
may relate Continuity Editing directly to Inattentional Blindness and Change Blindness. Editors
believe awareness of film editing can be minimised by coinciding cuts with moments when
attention is occupied by another task such as comprehending the narrative (Reisz & Millar, 1953;
Bordwell & Thompson, 2001), or hiding the cut transients during sudden onsets of motion (Reisz
& Millar, 1953; Dmytryk, 1986; Katz, 1991; Anderson, 1996; Bordwell & Thompson, 2001;
Pepperman, 2004), saccadic eye movements (Dmytryk, 1986), or eye blinks (Dmytryk, 1986;
Murch, 2001). (Smith & Henderson, 2008, p. 3)

Clearly, focused attention to an object is helpful and possibly necessary for change detection, as
evidenced by such center of interest effects (ORegan, Rensink, & Clark, 1996; Rensink et al.,
1997; Tarr & Aginsky, 1996, July) and by findings of more successful change detection when
explicit cues specify the location or the type of change (Aginsky, Tarr, & Rensink, 1997).
However, attention may not be sufficient for change detection. In fact, observers often fail to
detect changes even when attention is focused directly on the changing object (Levin & Simons,
1997; ORegan et al., 1997; Simons, 1996). In a recent series of studies, we used motion pictures
to directly examine the ability to detect changes to attended objects (Levin & Simons, 1997).
(Simons & Levin, 1998, p. 645).

However, partly because the job of filmmakers is to mask the sutures across changes in these
parameters, the definition of a scene, like that of continuity, is not only simply structural but also
psychological. It is as much defined by film viewers as by filmmakers. My tasks in this article are
to look at the concordance of viewer segmentations across the various types of narrative shifts in
a representative sample of popular movies; to catalog the relative frequencies of the shifts in
location, characters, and time; to suggest psychological causes for the differences that affect
segmentation; and to reveal under-appreciated aspects of Hollywood style. (Cutting, 2014, p. 69)

On the basis of these findings, we reasoned that if tracking the properties of attended objects
requires explicit coding, then it should be possible to induce change-detection errors in attended
objects if observers did not feel the need to explicitly label their features. Change-detection
failures would therefore reflect between-view representations which contain little property
information, both for scenes as a whole and for attended objects. (Levin & Simons, 1997, p.
502)