Match-Action: The Role of Motion and Audio in Creating Global Change Blindness in Film

The Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) Applied to Visual Narratives

“…As previously discussed, the perceptual processing demands of static versus dynamic visual narratives differ greatly and these may alter the degree to which back‐end processing influences front‐end attentional selection and information extraction. For example, Smith and colleagues (Smith & Henderson, ; Smith & Martin‐Portugues Santacreu, ) have demonstrated that continuity of a basic level action percept across a cut can obscure viewer awareness of the cut (i.e., edit blindness ), which involved a global change in viewpoint of the spatiotemporal context. Object features and even actor identity can also change across cuts without viewers noticing (Levin & Simons, ).…”

“…Object features and even actor identity can also change across cuts without viewers noticing (Levin & Simons, ). Diminished awareness of the shot change only occurs if sufficient action motion is present across the cut (hence the film technique name Match‐On‐Action: Smith & Martin‐Portugues Santacreu, ), suggesting that viewers may often lack the capacity (e.g., attentional resources, working memory, or executive resources) to encode detailed surface information that does not change key event indices (Sampanes, Tseng, & Bridgeman, ) or that such information is obscured by the image motion (Smith, ). Similar failures to notice differences between two different versions of the same static image are well known from “spot the difference” tasks.…”

“…Assumedly, such changes are also missed in comics across pairs of adjacent busy panels sharing much of the same background. Within the Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (AToCC) (Smith, , ), these effects are explained as postdiction , the backwards inference of the details of the event after it has begun rather than predictive inference (Smith & Martin‐Portugues Santacreu, ). Whether this absence of predictive inference is specific to the fast‐paced sequences used in these studies is not currently known.…”

“…However, not all cuts are missed, and their rate of detection is in proportion to the number of spatiotemporal and semantic features changed across the cut (Smith & Henderson, ; Smith & Martin‐Portugues Santacreu, ) and object changes will be noticed if they change meaning, even if the changes are relatively small (Sampanes et al, ). In support of this, recent eye movement evidence indicates that low‐level visual salience does not entirely account for gaze biases toward continued scene content across cuts—instead, memory‐guided attention facilitates the deployment of attention but only if the viewer is actively tracking scene content (Valuch, König, & Ansorge, ).…”

“…Further research is needed to investigate the temporal order of information extraction of the full range of key event indices across multiple fixations while viewing visual narratives. Other studies of change blindness and edit blindness while people watch films, however, raise questions about how much information viewers encode while viewing visual narratives (Levin & Simons, ; Smith & Henderson, ; Smith & Martin‐Portugues Santacreu, ). A testable hypothesis consistent with SPECT is that viewers will detect those changes that change important event indices in the current event model or, to a lesser degree, recently stored event models (Sampanes et al, ).…”