Jordan E. DeLong

Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film

Reaction times exhibit a spectral patterning known as 1/f, and these patterns can be thought of as reflecting time-varying changes in attention. We investigated the shot structure of Hollywood films to determine if these same patterns are found. We parsed 150 films with release dates from 1935 to 2005 into their sequences of shots and then analyzed the pattern of shot lengths in each film. Autoregressive and power analyses showed that, across that span of 70 years, shots became increasingly more correlated in length with their neighbors and created power spectra approaching 1/f. We suggest, as have others, that 1/f patterns reflect world structure and mental process. Moreover, a 1/f temporal shot structure may help harness observers’ attention to the narrative of a film.

Quicker, faster, darker: Changes in Hollywood film over 75 years.

We measured 160 English-language films released from 1935 to 2010 and found four changes. First, shot lengths have gotten shorter, a trend also reported by others. Second, contemporary films have more motion and movement than earlier films. Third, in contemporary films shorter shots also have proportionately more motion than longer shots, whereas there is no such relation in older films. And finally films have gotten darker. That is, the mean luminance value of frames across the length of a film has decreased over time. We discuss psychological effects associated with these four changes and suggest that all four linear trends have a single cause: Filmmakers have incrementally tried to exercise more control over the attention of filmgoers. We suggest these changes are signatures of the evolution of popular film; they do not reflect changes in film style.

Adaptation modulates the electrophysiological substrates of perceived facial distortion: support for opponent coding.

In two experiments we determined the electrophysiological substrates of figural aftereffects in face adaptation using compressed and expanded faces. In Experiment 1, subjects viewed a series of compressed and expanded faces. Results demonstrated that distortion systematically modulated the peak amplitude of the P250 event-related potential (ERP) component. As the amount of perceived distortion in a face increased, the peak amplitude of the P250 component decreased, regardless of whether the physical distortion was compressive or expansive. This provided an ERP metric of the degree of perceived distortion. In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of adaptation on the P250 amplitude by introducing an adapting stimulus that affected the subjects perception of the distorted test faces as measured through normality judgments. The set of test faces was held constant and the adapting stimulus was systematically varied across experimental days. Adapting to a compressed face made a less compressed test face appear more normal and an expanded test face more distorted as measured by normality ratings. We found that the adaptation conditions that increased the perceived distortion of the distorted test faces also decreased the amplitude of the P250. Likewise, adaptation conditions that decreased the perceived distortion of the distorted test faces also increased the amplitude of the P250. The results demonstrate that perceptual adaptation to compressed or expanded faces affected not only the behavioral normality judgments but also the electrophysiological correlates of face processing in the window of 190-260 ms after stimulus onset.

Added noise affects the neural correlates of upright and inverted faces differently

In five experiments, we examine the neural correlates of the interaction between upright faces, inverted faces, and visual noise. In Experiment 1, we examine a component termed the N170 for upright and inverted faces presented with and without noise. Results show a smaller amplitude for inverted faces than upright faces when presented in noise, whereas the reverse is true without noise. In Experiment 2, we show that the amplitude reversal is robust for full faces but not eyes alone across all noise levels. In Experiment 3, we vary contrast to see if this reversal is a result of degrading a face. We observe no reversal effects. Thus, across conditions, adding noise to full faces is a sufficient condition for the N170 reversal. In Experiment 4, we delay the onsets of the faces presented in noise. We replicate the smaller N170 for inverted faces at no delay but observe partial recovery of the N170 for inverted faces at longer delays in static noise. Experiment 5 demonstrates the interaction in low contrast at a behavioral level. We propose a model in which noise interacts with the processing properties of inverted faces more so than upright faces.

Horseshoes, handgrenades, and model fitting: the lognormal distribution is a pretty good model for shot-length distribution of Hollywood films

In an article published in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Redfern argues against the use of a lognormal distribution and summarizes previous work as ‘lacking in methodological detail and statistical rigour’. This response will summarize the article’s methodology and conclusion, arguing that while Redfern finds that films are not ‘perfectly’ lognormal, this is hardly evidence worthy of the ultimate conclusion that a lognormal fit is ‘inappropriate’. Perfection is fleeting, and cannot be expected when modeling real data. Reanalysis of Redfern’s methodology and findings shows that the lognormal distribution offers a pretty good fit.

Reverse correlating love: highly passionate women idealize their partner's facial appearance.

A defining feature of passionate love is idealization—evaluating romantic partners in an overly favorable light. Although passionate love can be expected to color how favorably individuals represent their partner in their mind, little is known about how passionate love is linked with visual representations of the partner. Using reverse correlation techniques for the first time to study partner representations, the present study investigated whether women who are passionately in love represent their partner’s facial appearance more favorably than individuals who are less passionately in love. In a within-participants design, heterosexual women completed two forced-choice classification tasks, one for their romantic partner and one for a male acquaintance, and a measure of passionate love. In each classification task, participants saw two faces superimposed with noise and selected the face that most resembled their partner (or an acquaintance). Classification images for each of high passion and low passion groups were calculated by averaging across noise patterns selected as resembling the partner or the acquaintance and superimposing the averaged noise on an average male face. A separate group of women evaluated the classification images on attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence. Results showed that women who feel high (vs. low) passionate love toward their partner tend to represent his face as more attractive and trustworthy, even when controlling for familiarity effects using the acquaintance representation. Using an innovative method to study partner representations, these findings extend our understanding of cognitive processes in romantic relationships.

Temporal fractals in movies and mind

Fractal patterns are seemingly everywhere. They can be analyzed through Fourier and power analyses, and other methods. Cutting, DeLong, and Nothelfer (2010) analyzed as time-series data the fluctuations of shot durations in 150 popular movies released over 70 years. They found that these patterns had become increasingly fractal-like and concluded that they might be linked to those found in the results of psychological tasks involving attention. To explore this possibility further, we began by analyzing the shot patterns of almost twice as many movies released over a century. The increasing fractal-like nature of shot patterns is affirmed, as determined by both a slope measure and a long-range dependence measure, neither of which is sensitive to the vector lengths of their inputs within the ranges explored here. But the main reason for increased long-range dependence is related to, but not caused by, the increasing vector length of the shot-series samples. It appears that, in generating increasingly fractal-like patterns, filmmakers have systematically explored dimensions that are important for holding our attention—shot durations, scene durations, motion, and sound amplitude—and have crafted fluctuations in them like those of our endogenous attention patterns. Other dimensions—luminance, clutter, and shot scale—are important to film style but their variations seem not to be important to holding viewers’ moment-to-moment attention and have not changed in their fractional dimension over time.

RSVP at the movies: dynamic images are remembered better than static images when resources are limited

ABSTRACT We examined whether dynamic images benefit memory when visual resources are limited. Almost all previous research in this area has used static photographs to examine viewers’ memory for image content, description, or visual attributes. Here, we investigated the short-term retention of brief stimuli using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) with short videos and static frames of 80, 160, 200, and 400 ms/item. Memory performance for dynamic images was generally better than for comparable still images of the same duration. There was also a strong recency effect for items briefer than 400 ms, which suggests that an optimal duration of about 400 ms may be necessary for dynamic images to be detected and fully processed. Interestingly, we also found that the presence of motion increased performance while the amount of motion did not.