Do not cross the line: Heuristic spatial updating in dynamic scenes

Abstract

In two experiments, we examined the spatial integration of two viewpoints onto dynamic scenes. We tested the spatial-alignment hypothesis (which predicts integration by alignment along the shortest path) against the spatialheuristic hypothesis (which predicts integration by observation of the left-right orientation on the screen). The stimuli consisted of film clips comprising two shots, each showing a car driving by. In Experiment 1, the dynamic scenes were ambiguous with regard to their interpretation: The cars could have been driving either in the same or in opposite directions. In line with the spatial-heuristic hypothesis, participants responded with "same direction" if the cars shared a screen direction. In Experiment 2, environmental cues disambiguated the dynamic scenes, and the screen direction of the cars was either congruent or incongruent with the depicted environmental cues. As compared with congruent dynamic scenes, incongruent dynamic scenes elicited prolonged reaction times, thus suggesting that heuristic spatial updating was used with congruent stimuli, whereas spatialalignment processes were used with incongruent stimuli.

Modeling Mental Spatial Reasoning About Cardinal Directions

“…As a result, both the number of nodes and the number of possible cardinal directions are kept at a minimum in SARF CD . Given SARF CD 's success in accounting for human spatial reasoning behavior, our work supports and complements existing findings on the economic nature of human spatial information processing (Huff & Schwan, ).…”

Your Brain on Comics: A Cognitive Model of Visual Narrative Comprehension

“…As a result, greater updating occurs with greater discontinuity of the incoming information given the preceding context (Huff, Meitz, & Papenmeier, ; Magliano & Zacks, ). For example, updating of situational changes may occur across dimensions of characters, spatial locations, or event information, as posited by theories of visual and verbal narrative (Bateman & Wildfeuer, ; Hoeks & Brouwer, ; Huff & Schwan, ; Magliano, Miller, & Zwaan, ; Saraceni, ; Stainbrook, ; Zwaan & Radvansky, ). Because a situation model is always being built in reference to a progressing (visual) discourse, such updating processes occur iteratively at each unit of a (visual) discourse, not just to incongruities.…”

Event related message processing: perceiving and remembering changes in films with and without soundtrack

“…If, however, event segmentation is a general perceptual and cognitive process that is independent of the stimulus' modality, we expect event segmentation to be comparable between experimental conditions. Bordwell, 2002) and mean length of event segments (between 5 and 60 seconds, depending on the nature of the stimulus material; e.g., Huff & Schwan, 2012;Zacks, Speer, & Reynolds, 2009) were used to estimate the appropriate duration of the stimulus material to get a sufficient number of event boundaries. This resulted in a duration of the clips between 5 and 6 minutes.…”

“…The impression of the chase is distorted. For visual dynamic scenes, it was shown that the mere spatial positioning of cameras influences the perception of continuity (Huff & Schwan, 2012). Baker and Levin (2015) have shown that observers' ability to detect changes across filmic cuts depended on the cameras' positions.…”