A window on reality: perceiving edited moving images

Edited moving images entertain, inform, and coerce us throughout our daily lives, yet until recently, the way people perceive movies has received little psychological attention. We review the history of empirical investigations into movie perception and the recent explosion of new research on the subject using methods such as behavioral experiments, functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) eye tracking, and statistical corpus analysis. The Hollywood style of moviemaking, which permeates a wide range of visual media, has evolved formal conventions that are compatible with the natural dynamics of attention and humans’ assumptions about continuity of space, time, and action. Identifying how people overcome the sensory differences between movies and reality provides an insight into how the same cognitive processes are used to perceive continuity in the real world

Marriage, Migration, and Urban Demographic Structure: a Case From France in the Belle Epoque

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67248/2/10.1177_036319908100600109.pd

Mind wandering during film comprehension: The role of prior knowledge and situational interest

We assessed mind wandering (MW) during film comprehension. We predicted that prior-knowledge would aid in theconstruction of a situation model of the film, which would suppress MW by directing attention towards task-related thoughts,and that interest would moderate this effect. In our experiment, 108 participants either read a short story that depicted the plot(i.e., prior-knowledge condition) or read an unrelated story of equal length (control condition) prior to viewing the 32.5 minutefilm The Red Balloon. Participants self-reported their interest in viewing the film immediately before the film presentationand reported self-caught instances of MW while viewing the film. The prior-knowledge condition reported less MW comparedto the control condition. MW also decreased over the course of the film, but only for the prior-knowledge condition, therebysuggesting a suppression effect. Finally, prior-knowledge effects on MW were only observed when interest was average orhigh