Talk: Experimental psychology in cinema using mobile technologies.Author: Stephen J. HindeCollaborators/supervisors: Tim J. Smith, Birkbeck University, and Katrin Heimann, Interacting Minds Centre
Please look here for details of adjunct demos which you can do before the talk:
https://tinyurl.com/yaqupv9s
Studies of film and media experience have been studied by psychologists and neuroscientists within a laboratory settings casting a general light on how we pay attention to film (see: Cutting, DeLong, & Nothelfer, 2010; Smith, 2012).During PhD research by (Hinde, 2017) on watching people watching film,studies of attention were made using diverse techniques including eye tracking, and behavioural measures. However, the potential lack of invariance between the laboratory and within ecologically valid settings has been a cause for concern by many (see Kingstone, Smilek & Eastwood, 2008). For example, the laboratory experience of watching participants watching film could be very different from the normal setting in a cinema due to the social setting, expectations and dimensionality of the cinema.
Due to recent advances in technology progresswith mobile devices and mobile sensors, it is now possible to conduct experiments on attention using diverse measurements within the cinema. New research questions can then be addressed, e.g.:
- What is the difference between attention to film in the laboratory setting and in the cinema?
- What is the effect of being in a social setting with a group of people rather than individually watching a film
This talk will discuss a methodology for taking experimental psychology to the cinema using mobile technologies
.During SCSMI a demonstration of an audience experiment with iPhones, with a short film clip will be made using a dual-task approach .
The gathering of quantitative data pertaining to film in order to help film research has been discussed with SCSMI before.. However, to our knowledge no significant psychological corpus of data taken from human perception while people watch film in cinemas has been collected. A possible challenge for SCSMI would be to conduct some psychological cinemetrics experiments.
References
- Cutting, J. E., DeLong, J. E., & Nothelfer, C. E. (2010). Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797610361679
- Kingstone, A., Smilek, D., & Eastwood, J. D. (2008).
- Cognitive ethology: A new approach for studying human cognition. British Journal of Psychology, 99(3), 317-340
- Hinde, S.(2016) (SubmittedOctober 2016) PhD Thesis, University of BristolSalt, B. (2011). The metrics in Cinemetrics. Retrieved August, 8, 2015.
- Smith, T. J. (2012). The Attentional theory of cinematic continuity. Projections, 6(1).