How Do Movies Direct Visual Attention?

When I noticed this topic between all the others, I knew this was the one that was made for me. This topic enabled me to learn about video on a deep cognitive science level. Something that I haven’t done before and that really sparked my interest. I thoroughly enjoyed working on this topic and feel proud to say that I graduated my master’s thesis with an 8.

Short summary of the thesis:
Viewers can easily understand how a sequence of shots belongs together and forms a story.
One might think that this is all because of the way we learned to interpret movies. However, this is due to the fascinating interaction between how perception/attention works, and how filmmakers learned to make use of perceptional and attentional processes in order to guide them, or even trick them.

In this thesis, these attentional and perceptional processes will be explained in order to show how filmmakers can guide them by the use of attentional cues. One of these cues (the gaze cue) is used in an eye tracking experiment to test the effectiveness of such a cue. By showing ~40 participants 20 different movie clips I was able to derive conclusions about the effectiveness of the gaze cue, reflect on past theories and the current findings, and propose ideas for future research.

For a full and in depth read of my work, feel free to download the thesis below.