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This paper investigates how interdisciplinary research impacts the film industry in research and practice by introducing psychological concepts. Psychology, especially neural and cognitive science, provides a distinct advantage when examining humans’ audio-visual processing mechanisms and esthetics questions regarding the film. By introducing psychology, film researchers and filmmakers could rethink and evaluate the current research paradigm from a broader point of view. This paper consists of three parts: (1) a discussion on the nature of film using an interdisciplinary approach; (2) a discussion on the characteristics and attributes of film; (3) an introduction of the psychological concept of “affordance” to film studies and practice. Although the film interdisciplinary research paradigm is still under development, we argue that introducing the other subjects is innovating the field of film research, providing us with a new angle to examine the intersections of ubiquitous but complex human esthetics activities.

There is promising potential in the application of algorithmic facial landmark estimation to the early prediction, in infants, of pediatric developmental disorders and other conditions. However, the performance of these deep learning algorithms is severely hampered by the scarcity of infant data. To spur the development of facial landmarking systems for infants, we introduce InfAnFace, a diverse, richly-annotated dataset of infant faces. We use InfAnFace to benchmark the performance of existing facial landmark estimation algorithms that are trained on adult faces and demonstrate there is a significant domain gap between the representations learned by these algorithms when applied on infant vs. adult faces. Finally, we put forward the next potential steps to bridge that gap 1 .

STEM learning aims to prepare students with hands-on and problem-based learning. However, teacher-centered instruction has been the predominant course delivery technique in STEM education regardless face-to-face or online learning context. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study explores the expectations of effective online courses based on Moore’s three types of interactions among Chinese STEM college students taking synchronous teacher-centered lecture-based online courses. A total of 175 undergraduate STEM students were recruited at one Chinese university. Results indicate that these students expect their instructors to integrate activities to motivate interactions with their instructor, peers, and the learning content. Students’ perceptions of the advantages and challenges of taking synchronous lecture-based courses are also discussed. It is expected that the findings would enlighten professionals of higher education in China to adjust teacher-centered instruction and to adequately prepare and train online instructors to foster an active online learning environment in STEM fields.

Cutting (2021) argues that the narrational complexity of fiction film can be quantified similarly to computational measures of text complexity. Narrational complexity refers to the structure that arises from how a story is told. This article expands upon Cutting's proposal by taking inspiration from contemporary approaches for measuring text complexity. These approaches reject the notion that complexity can be measured via a limited set of indices as Cutting proposed for narrational complexity. Similarly, we argue that narrational complexity for fiction films should be multi-dimension and include indices that are associated with events, characters, and the rules that govern the fictional world. We discuss the viability of using computational approaches to analyze video and natural language processing to develop approaches to measuring narrational complexity.