Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of filmic technology as a form of the proto-cinematic, a term I use as media scholars do—to describe devices integral to film history but that also each had a cultural impact in its own unique way. To demonstrate and support this argument, my project first introduces readers to a range of proto-cinematic technologies, toys that were important during the nineteenth century, and establishes these as a lens through which we might read Victorian narratives. The subsequent chapters offer close readings that delineate my proposed methodology; texts include Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s Sherlock Holmes stories

Technē/Technology:Researching Cinema and Media Technologies - Their Development, Use, and Impact

Technē/Technology is the up-to-date critical volume on the theories, philosophies, and debates on technology and their productivity for the fields of film and media studies. Comprehensive as well as innovative, it is not organised around a single thesis - except the assertion that technique is a major concern for film and media scholars, whether this is approached in terms of philosophy, techno-aesthetics, semiotics, apparatus theory, (new) film history, media archaeology, the industry or the sensory / cognitive experiences. Technē/Technology deliberately includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different ways on a wide range of technology-related issues. A major questions to be addressed in this book is how the new philosophies (of technology) created in relation to major technological transformations - such as the new philosophies of (media) technology formulated by Benjamin, Heidegger, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stiegler - could or did contribute in turn to the modification of film theory and some of its key concepts

Technē/Technology:Researching Cinema and Media Technologies - Their Development, Use, and Impact

Technē/Technology is the up-to-date critical volume on the theories, philosophies, and debates on technology and their productivity for the fields of film and media studies. Comprehensive as well as innovative, it is not organised around a single thesis - except the assertion that technique is a major concern for film and media scholars, whether this is approached in terms of philosophy, techno-aesthetics, semiotics, apparatus theory, (new) film history, media archaeology, the industry or the sensory / cognitive experiences. Technē/Technology deliberately includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different ways on a wide range of technology-related issues. A major questions to be addressed in this book is how the new philosophies (of technology) created in relation to major technological transformations - such as the new philosophies of (media) technology formulated by Benjamin, Heidegger, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stiegler - could or did contribute in turn to the modification of film theory and some of its key concepts