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British Journal of Psychology (2015), 106, 133–151 © 2014 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

First-time viewers’ comprehension of films: Bridging shot transitions Sermin Ildirar1* and Stephan Schwan2 1 2

Department of Cinema, Istanbul University, Turkey Knowledge Acquisition with Cybermedia Lab, Knowledge Media Research Center, T€ ubingen, Germany Which perceptual and cognitive prerequisites must be met in order to be able to comprehend a film is still unresolved and a controversial issue. In order to gain some insights into this issue, our field experiment investigates how first-time adult viewers extract and integrate meaningful information across film cuts. Three major types of commonalities between adjacent shots were differentiated, which may help first-time viewers with bridging the shots: pictorial, causal, and conceptual. Twenty first-time, 20 low-experienced and 20 high-experienced viewers from Turkey were shown a set of short film clips containing these three kinds of commonalities. Film clips conformed also to the principles of continuity editing. Analyses of viewers’ spontaneous interpretations show that first-time viewers indeed are able to notice basic pictorial (object identity), causal (chains of activity), as well as conceptual (links between gaze direction and object attention) commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. However, first-time viewers’ comprehension of the commonalities is to a large degree fragile, indicating the lack of a basic notion of what constitutes a film.

Today’s feature films are comprised of thousands of individual shots that are all edited in a manner to be comprehended by the viewers as a single ongoing story. Although there are different kinds of shot transitions such as wipes and dissolves, straight cuts make up almost 99 per cent of all transitions in contemporary films (Cutting, DeLong, & Brunick, 2011). A contemporary Hollywood film with a duration of 90 min typically contains approximately one thousand cuts; an action based film may contain more than two thousand cuts, implying one shot transition every 2.7 s on average (Bordwell & Thompson, 2001). Despite this high frequency of abrupt visual changes, today’s audiences from industrialized countries have no difficulty following a film’s story line even in complex, feature-length movies (Magliano, Miller, & Zwaan, 2001; Zacks & Magliano, 2011). The underlying question about which perceptual and cognitive prerequisites must be met in order to be able to comprehend a film has been answered in different ways, depending on the notion of how film spectatorship relates to real-world experiences. On the one hand, films have been considered as highly stylized and conventionalized ways of depicting scenes and events (Arnheim, 1957). Hence, in order to comprehend a movie, viewers will have to have acquired some knowledge about filmic rules and conventions beforehand. On the other hand, similarities between the way a film is

*Correspondence should be addressed to Sermin Ildirar, Istanbul Universitesi Merkez Kampusu Iletisim Fakultesi 34452 Beyazit-Fatih/Istanbul/, Turkey (email: [email protected]). DOI:10.1111/bjop.12069

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presented and the patterns and mechanisms of everyday perception have been emphasized (M€ unsterberg, 1916/1970). From this perspective, films sufficiently resemble natural ways of viewing and therefore should be understood almost instantly without any film-specific expertise. In order to gain some insights into this still unresolved and controversial issue, we will report in the following on a field experiment conducted with a sample of 20 adult first-time viewers from Turkey. First-time viewers were shown a set of short film clips that contained various types of cuts conforming to the principles of continuity editing (which will be discussed below) as they are typical for current mainstream films. Analyses of viewers’ spontaneous interpretations show that first-time viewers indeed are able to notice some commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. However, their comprehension of the commonalities is to a large degree fragile, indicating the lack of a basic notion of what constitutes a film.

Establishing continuity and coherence in films In the early days of cinema, most films depicted simple real-world scenes or staged narratives filmed in a single run (a shot) using a static camera. Shortly thereafter, filmmakers combined multiple shots – separated by cuts (abrupt discontinuities from one shot to the next), dissolves, fades, or wipes – to create more compelling visual narratives. A suite of staging, filming, and editing conventions emerged through trial and error that allowed viewers to effortlessly integrate these diverse views. Most of these conventions, known as continuity editing rules (or Hollywood style), were in common usage by 1918 (Nornes & Gerow, 2009). In the years 1915–1916, a typical Hollywood feature film contained between 250 and 450 shots, which means an average shot length was 12–13 s. After establishing continuity editing, an average shot length sped up to 5–7 s between the years 1917–1928 (Bordwell, Staiger, & Thompson, 1985). Accordingly, the Hollywood style of film editing obeying continuity editing rules became widespread via systematic instructions in ‘how to’ books and film classes (Nornes & Gerow, 2009) and gradually replaced the alternative forms of editing in other parts of the world, most noticeably in Russia and East Asia (Smith, 2012). Developing a visual language in a country of people who speak many different languages made sense; it also helped Hollywood to sell its productions worldwide. A common continuity editing pattern starts with a full or long shot, which is called establishing shot and is far enough away from the main figures and objects to show their positions relative to each other. After establishing the scene, the director begins to break it down. By breaking down, directors follow the 180° rule, which states that two characters in a scene should always have the same left/right relationship with each other. Characters’ talk is usually recorded in shot-reverse-shots or over-the-shoulder shots. If an actor or object is seen moving left-to-right across the screen in one shot, the next shot of their action should also present them moving left-to-right. This is referred to as a directional match (Bordwell & Thompson, 2001; Katz, 1991). By cutting from one shot to another view, an action can be started in the first shot and carried through to completion in the next. This helps the viewers build a visual bridge between the shots, distracts them from noticing the cut. This film editing technique is called match-on-action. Another continuity editing rule is the 30° rule, which requires more than 30° between the two camera positions from which the shots will be juxtaposed in order to avoid the objects on the screen to appear to ‘jump’ (Reisz & Millar, 1953). In addition to these rules, maintaining ongoing sounds in the soundtrack (Bordwell & Thompson, 2001) and naturally occurring

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attention cues such as conversational turns, character’s gaze shifts, and pointing gestures (Smith, 2012) play important roles in continuity perception in movies as well.

Perceiving continuity in films Various empirical studies have demonstrated that Western adult viewers perceive film sequences which conform to principles of continuity cinema as coherent scenes without noticeable interruptions. In particular, despite their artificiality, cuts often go unnoticed by the viewers, provided they conform to the principles of continuity editing (i.e. edit blindness; Smith & Henderson, 2008). Also, subjects respond more slowly to continuity cuts than to discontinuity cuts because the former are more difficult to notice (D’Ydewalle & Vanderbeeken, 1990). Similarly, when viewers have to perform a secondary task while watching a film, their responses to the secondary task will be slower after discontinuities, indicating that processing continuity cuts requires fewer cognitive resources (Geiger & Reeves, 1993; Lang, Geiger, Strickwerda, & Sumner, 1993). However, viewers are not only blind to cuts but also to changes in the scenes itself. In their seminal study, Levin and Simons (1997) showed that in a dialogue scene depicted as shot-reverse-shot sequence, changes of scenic elements (clothes, objects on table) mostly went unnoticed across cuts. Also, even changing an actor across a match-on-action cut went unnoticed by most of the viewers (Levin & Simons, 1997). Further, recent studies show some tolerance of violations in the correct sequence of presenting everyday activities across shots (Levin & Hymel, 2012). Finally, gaps between shots are automatically bridged by inferences (Strickland & Keil, 2011; Tibus, Heier, & Schwan, 2013). All these findings show that despite their discontinuities, film depictions of events are typically processed with apparent ease and that viewers are surprisingly tolerant of inconsistencies that go along with the sequences of shots. Since M€ unsterberg (1916/1970), many film scholars have explained film comprehension by its similarity to the perception of real scenes and events, in spite of the mismatch between the psychologically perceived continuity and the spatiotemporally discontinuous nature of the visual information. Some authors (Cutting, 2005; Murch, 2001) have posited a correspondence of cuts with visual interruptions that occur naturally due to blinking and saccadic gaze shifts. It has also been argued that cuts are masked by visual changes, particularly when they are placed within or before a period of fast motion, as when a film editor matches on action (Levin & Varakin, 2004; Smith, 2012; Smith & Henderson, 2008). Further mechanisms that may contribute to the perceived seamless flow of film scenes include the tendency of the human observers to segment the stream of ongoing activities into discrete events (Zacks & Magliano, 2011) as well as the notion that principles of film editing mimic the course of natural attention: For example, after arrival in a new situation, an onlooker surveys the scene (establishing shot), then he/she focuses upon a detail (cut-in) or glances back and forth at the participants in a conversation (shot-reverse-shot) or glances to the side when distracted by a sound or motion (cutaway; Bordwell, 1985). On the other hand, in many instances, films do not mimic the course of natural perception but, instead, systematically deviate from it. For example, often the film anticipates certain events, cutting to a place immediately before something important (a bomb exploding, a telephone ringing) will happen there (Bordwell, 1985). Also, even simple dialogue scenes contain abrupt changes of viewing positions which are impossible in real-world situations. By utilizing formal features, films induce and shape predictive inferences in a manner that is different from real-world cognition (Magliano, Dijkstra, &

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Zwaan, 1996). Hence, while films may make use of principles of natural perception, they also contain numerous deviations from real-world conditions, possibly requiring viewers to possess sufficient knowledge of cinematic conventions to be able to comprehend the films content, a theoretical position that has been prominently advocated by Rudolf Arnheim (1957).

The role of natural perception versus knowledge of conventions in film comprehension Different lines of empirical research have tried to disentangle the contributions of natural perception on the one hand and knowledge of filmic conventions on the other, including experimentally violating principles of continuity editing, conducting developmental studies, and investigating members of cultures without any contact to films. Several experimental studies have dealt with violations of the 180° rule as a core element of the system of continuity editing rules. In contrast to the assumption that the 180° rule corresponds to natural perception, it was found that adult film-experienced viewers are surprisingly tolerant of violations of the rule, showing no confusion or decreases in comprehension (Germeys & d’Ydewalle, 2007). Also, a recent study by Huff and Schwan (2012) found that in the case of film sequences which conformed to the 180° rule, viewers switched from resource consuming spatial updating that is typical for natural perception to a simplified processing heuristic which is based on the specific visual characteristics implied by the 180° rule. Again, this finding speaks for a conventionalist interpretation of the 180° rule, probably requiring some film experience in order to be processed appropriately by the viewer. Another line of research demonstrates that the appropriate interpretation of films increases with age and experience. In general, infant attention to natural scenes and edited moving-images begins by being stimulus-driven and progresses to more top–down control as the child matures cognitively and acquires general world knowledge as well as knowledge about formal features, namely, film literacy (Anderson & Levin, 1976; Crawley, Anderson, Wilder, Williams, & Santomero, 1999). Accordingly, several studies have found that film viewing is based on certain acquired cognitive skills (Frith & Robson, 1975; Smith, Anderson, & Fischer, 1985; Wright et al., 1984). Also, studies that have compared eye movements of adults and infants suggest that similarity of gaze location increases with age (Frank, Vul, & Johnson, 2009; Goldstein, Woods, & Peli, 2007; Kirkorian, Anderson, & Keen, 2012). More recently, in their study in which they investigated children’s processing of film cuts by an eye tracker experiment, Munk et al. (2012) found that some viewing skills are developed between 4 and 6 years of age. On the other hand, Abelman (1990) found that comprehension of some types of film editing depends more on TV watching frequency than on the age of the child. Taken together, developmental studies suffer from the problem of confounding increase in film experience with maturation of cognitive abilities in general, making it difficult to interpret the results in terms of the dichotomy between natural perception and acquisition of filmic editing conventions. They must therefore be complemented by reports and studies of adult persons who for the first time watch a film because these studies avoid the confounds of cognitive maturity with film experience and therefore allow for evaluating knowledge of established editing conventions better as a necessary prerequisite for film comprehension. Yet, while anecdotal reports may shed some light on the issue, they typically lack the necessary methodological precision (Colapinto, 2007; Forsdale & Forsdale, 1970). Notable exceptions are the studies by Hobbs et al. (1988) and by Schwan and Ildirar (2010). Hobbs et al. (1988) conducted their study in Kenya. They

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filmed a local story in two versions and presented it to a sample of natives who were more or less unfamiliar with films. In the first version, they recorded the whole story in one shot and in the second version they broke it down into the cuts using some features of continuity editing such as different camera scales and angles. Hobbs et al. (1988) found no significant differences between the two versions with respect to comprehension but several aspects of the study make its interpretation difficult. In particular, only one edited film version was shown that included only a small number of edits, which are not described in detail. A similar field study was conducted by Schwan and Ildirar (2010) but painted a more differentiated picture. Here, adult viewers with no prior watching experience were presented a set of short video clips that used various editing principles such as shot-reverse-shots, ellipses (skipping of time segments), or cross-cutting between two simultaneous events taking place at different locations. Also, a control group of film experienced viewers with similar demographical background was tested with the same set of clips. The study found that the first-time viewers could not make sense of several types of editing principles, including shot-reverse-shots, establishing shots, or point-of-view shots. Although all of them were able to describe the individual shots, most of them could not integrate the shots into a coherent representation of the depicted situations or events. Only if a video clip showed a line of familiar and coherent activities across all shots, did first-time viewers give appropriate interpretations. This was the case even for complex cinematographic features such as ellipses or cross-cutting. Therefore, one major conclusion drawn from the data was that first-time viewers do not connect shots perceptually by noticing common visual elements but, instead, by cognitively relating them on the basis of familiar lines of events and activities.

Commonalities between shots as means for establishing continuity The findings of Schwan and Ildirar (2010) draw attention to the mechanisms of connecting adjacent shots in a semantically meaningful manner, which in turn can be considered an important prerequisite for establishing a coherent mental representation of the film’s content; that is, instead of asking ‘Which kind of changes – such as a switch of camera position, change of location, change of actor, or jump in time – are intelligible to first-time viewers?’, the complementary question ‘Which kind of commonalities between adjacent shots allow first-time viewers to connect shots and integrate them into an appropriate coherent mental representation?’ now comes into focus. In consideration of both continuity editing rules and the results of Schwan and Ildirar (2010), three different types of relations can be distinguished that may possibly allow film first-time viewers to connect the shots, namely, pictorial, causal, and conceptual relations. Pictorial relations establish a link between adjacent shots by means of their visible similarities. Verbally, they can be described as ‘shot B is perceptually similar to shot A’ or ‘shot B is a visible part of shot A’ (or vice versa). Typical examples are switching between different shot sizes and different camera angles of the same scene. In all these cases, the viewer may notice some perceptual commonalities across adjacent shots, indicating the identity of certain objects, actors, or locations across the shots. The findings of Schwan and Ildirar (2010) suggest that pure pictorial relations seem not to be sufficient for first-time viewers to connect shots appropriately. For example, a shot-reverse-shot sequence of a man looking right, followed by a shot of a man looking left, with both actors shown against the same scenic background, was not interpreted as ‘Two men looking at each other’ but, instead, as two completely independent scenes: ‘First, there was a man,

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then he was gone, and then, another man appeared.’ Yet, in the mentioned clip the pictorial overlap was restricted to the scenic background and therefore only moderate. In contrast, in a dialogue scene, over-the-shoulder shots would depict both talkers in each shot (one shown from the front, and the other from the back), thereby extending the visual overlap from the similarity of the background to the portrayed persons, too. An even higher visual overlap would be to show the same object or person in two adjacent shots from two different viewpoints. Therefore, the question arises whether adjacent shots with a high degree of visual overlap may lead first-time viewers to connect them appropriately. Causal relations are based on the continuation of an event or an activity across successive shots. Verbally, they can be described as ‘shot B is caused or enabled by shot A’. Often, they go along with some pictorial commonalities, for instance, if a film shows a sequence of actions performed at a certain location or by the same actor. But there are also instances in which the link between the shots is established on purely causal relations, for example, when a shot of person firing a gun is followed by a shot of a wounded deer. While certain movements induce an immediate impression of causality, more complex sequences of activities typically require a familiarity with the activity in order to be intelligible for viewers (Zacks & Tversky, 2003). In the Schwan and Ildirar (2010) study, video clips that contained a familiar ongoing activity, such as preparing tea or cooking a meal, were interpreted accordingly by first-time viewers. But the question arises, how elaborate the viewers’ understanding of the portrayed events in fact was. Naming and describing an activity may possibly rely simply on recognizing a familiar action, which in turn may activate a script that is used to describe the event in a schematic manner. In contrast, indications of a more elaborate understanding would be both the ability to identify inconsistencies (e.g. wrong order of activities or use of wrong tools or objects), details (e.g. close-up shots of an object used or not used in the presented activity), or the ability to predict what will happen next (Magliano et al., 1996). Conceptual relations are based on a semantic relationship of the entities shown in two shots that cannot be captured by identity (pictorial relation) or activity (causal relation). Typical examples are switches from an outside to an inside view (shot B is happening in the building shown in shot A) or an eye-line match (the object in shot B is looked at by the person in shot A). However, in feature films, causal relations typically imply a succession in time, in the sense that shot B happens after shot A, conceptual relations typically imply simultaneity. The findings of Schwan and Ildirar (2010) indicate that first-time viewers were not able to connect adjacent shots that showed an outside view of a building followed by an inside view on a purely conceptual basis. But again, the conceptual relation realized in the videos was only moderate. Stronger relations would include commonalities in terms of functions or events, for example, showing the outside of mosque followed by a man praying inside the mosque. Also, as research on joint attention has shown, connecting a person’s gaze with an object lying in the direction of the gaze constitutes a particularly strong relation that is acquired early in childhood (Moore & Dunham, 1995). Eye-line matches as filmic equivalents of this process of synchronizing attention may therefore provide an instance of conceptual relation that may be particularly easy to interpret even for first-time viewers. To sum up, films may use a broad range of pictorial, causal, and conceptual relations for making the coherence of adjacent shots salient to their viewers. The vast majority of these relations – be it the identity of objects seen from different viewing angles, the constancy of background in a given scene, the continuation of an activity across several locations, or the link between viewer and object by means of gaze direction – are grounded in everyday

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experiences outside the realm of films. Accordingly, at least in principle, each of these relations could be used by first-time viewers to link adjacent shots in order to develop a coherent mental representation of the portrayed events. On the other hand, some of these relations may be perceptually too weak to compensate for visual interruptions caused by film cuts. In this case, familiarity with the conventions of films may be needed in order to be able to cognitively link adjacent shots. While the findings of Schwan and Ildirar (2010) have provided some first evidence for the notion that first-time viewers do not make use of all of these relations but pay attention primarily to causal relations, the present study aimed at investigating these matters in a more systematic way. To depict pictorial, causal, and conceptual relations, a set of short film clips were produced and presented to a group of film first-time adult viewers and to two groups of viewers with differing amounts of viewing experience, recording their spontaneous verbal interpretations of the films’ contents.

Method Ethical approval Ethical approval was obtained from the Research Ethics Committee of the University Hospital of the Istanbul University, Turkey.

Participants Sixty participants (30 female and 30 male, mean age = 64.03 years, range = 48–72 years) took part in the study. The experimental group (i.e., first-time viewers) included 20 (10 female and 10 male, mean age = 66.4 years, range = 58–72 years) adult participants who had no prior experience with movies or television. Living isolated in small houses in the mountains south of Isparta, Turkey, they had no electricity until recent times and could not afford the expenses of a television set. All participants of the experimental group knew about the existence of television and had some abstract ideas about it. All of them had also some photos, mostly of their children or grandchildren and four of them had radios with a very limited broadcast range. Many of them described television as ‘visual radio’ and assumed that a television reports the news and shows people who speak (or sing) in radio. None of them had come into direct contact with any film screening and had not even abstract ideas about it. Participants had a considerably low level of education. The highest level of education among all participants was 5 years of primary education. Seven of the first-time viewers were illiterate. While five of them had 5 years of education, the average education level was 1.95 years. Additionally, we recruited two further groups of participants who had a similar geographical and cultural background: The participants of these groups were living in a small village down in the valley and had already some experience with film and television. They spoke the same dialect and had a similar way of living with a little bit more comfort. The second group consisted of 20 individuals with a relatively small amount of viewing experience (i.e., low-experienced viewers; 10 female and 10 male, mean age = 63.8 years, range = 48–73 years). They had owned a television set for 3–5 years but watched it infrequently (no daily viewing, mostly watching the news). Five of them were illiterate and the average level of education was 3.15 years. The third group consisted of 20 individuals with substantial viewing experience (i.e., high-experienced viewers 10 female and 10 male, mean age = 61.9 years, range = 56–72). They had been watching television for more than 20 years and watched more frequently than the other

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two groups (watching programmes daily, including fictional entertainment). Three of them were illiterate and their average education level was 3.1 years. Thus, besides serving as a control condition for the interpretive performance of the novice viewers, comparisons between the two groups also allowed for assessing the role of different amounts of viewing experience for processes of information integration across cuts. A one-factorial ANOVA showed a significant overall difference in age, F(57,2) = 3.7, p = .03, with novice viewers being significantly older than high-experienced viewers, while no significant age differences were found between novice viewers and low-experienced viewers and between low-experienced and high-experienced viewers (according to Scheff e with an alpha level of 5%). Also, the three groups did not differ with regard to educational level, v2(4) = 4.48, p = .34.

Stimuli Twenty short film clips lasting between 6 and 30 s were produced. Care was taken that all film content was familiar to the participants by showing events, situations, locations, and actors from the physical and social environment of the participants, such as cutting firewood, having breakfast, or praying. All film clips were muted. An overview of the film clips is given in Table 1. Six film clips addressed pictorial relations, each consisting of visually overlapping shots. The first two film clips depicted the same objects (a donkey and a cow) from two different camera angles. The second two film clips depicted people standing across from each other in establishing shots and such shots cut to single shots of such people. Two further film clips showed two people also standing across from each other but this time in over-the shoulder shots. Seven film clips addressed causal relations, each depicting a series of shots of an ongoing activity. The first clip showed one single action, namely, a man passing a bucket to a woman. The action of passing began in the first shot and continued in the second, which means that the shots were edited according to match-on-action convention. Two film clips showed more complex sequences of familiar activities, namely, preparing tea and cutting firewood. Additionally, modified versions of these clips were produced by replacing a typical action by an inconsistent one. In the tea-making film, a close-up of taking the tea jar from the shelf was replaced by a close-up of hands being wiped, and in the woodcutting film, a close-up of sweeping the chips of wood was replaced by a close-up of the shoes of the man. A sixth video clip showed the activity of milking a cow, again in an inconsistent manner, because a gas can was used instead of a bucket. The seventh film clip tested the ability of the viewers to make predictive inferences. The clip showed a man with dirty hands approaching a faucet and stopped before the man would start to wash his hands. Another seven film clips addressed conceptual relations between shots. In two videos, an eye-line match was presented, depicting a person looking in a certain direction, followed by a shot that shows the object of attention. In the first clip, a man lifts his head and looks up, while the next shot shows the top of a tree against the blue sky. In the second clip, a woman lowers her head and looks down, while the next shot shows a pair of shoes lying on the ground. The third, more complex film showed a young man, a dog, and a stone in a cross-cutting sequence, implying that the young man will drive the dog off by throwing a stone at it. In the other two film clips, a long shot of scenery was followed by a

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Table 1. Examples of the film clips used in the experiment.

Note. All film clips used in the evaluations can be found in the Supplemental Material available online.

medium close-up of an object in that scene, namely, a bird in a tree and a bee on a flower. Since the objects were too small to be seen in the first shot, viewers had to relate both shots conceptually. Finally, in the last two film clips, a transition was made from an outside view to an inside view. In both cases, the outside was indicative of an object or an activity that was performed inside: The front of a mosque followed by a man praying inside it and a house with a smoking chimney, followed by a woman cooking a meal.

Procedure The participants were tested in individual sessions at their homes. The experimental session that lasted 90–120 min was started only after the interviewer, who was one of the

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authors (S.I.), became familiar with the participant. First, in order to check for possible auditory, visual, or cognitive deficits, participants were asked to describe their present situation (e.g., what they saw outside the window). Next, they were interviewed about their experience with and their knowledge about television and films. This interview included indirect questions about such matters as whether participants had ever been outside of their village, whether they regularly visited their children, whether their children had a television set, whether they knew about the political agenda of their country and knew popular television stars. Then a laptop with a 17.3 inch display, which had been set up at the beginning of the session, was introduced. The laptop was placed at a distance of ~60 cm. Participants were told that they would see something on the display and were asked to describe it as they had previously described their present (real-life) situation. They were asked additional questions in order to be sure of their interpretations of the film clips. For example, when they said that they had seen a bird, they were then asked where the bird was. When they said that the bird was in a tree, they were asked further where the tree was in order to be sure that they meant the tree shown in the first shot of the film clip. Otherwise, they might not have made a connection between the shots and only assumed that a bird should normally be in a tree. All participants were presented all video clips in randomized order, with the exception of the two activities (tea preparation, woodcutting) for which two versions (one consistent and one with an inconsistent insert) were produced. In these cases, half of the participants watched the consistent version, while the other half watched the inconsistent one. All experimental sessions were video recorded and transcribed later. For each clip, a ‘standard interpretation’ was defined that was based on an appropriate understanding of common filmic rules (see Table 1 for the standard interpretation for each film clip). In the present study, we assumed the validity of the standard interpretation if it was given by the majority of the high-experienced viewers. The verbal responses were coded from transcripts in considerable detail with the qualitative analysis program Atlas-ti. Then, for each participant and each clip, the correspondence of his or her interpretation with the standard interpretation was determined independently by two coders, one of whom was one of the authors (S. I.), with an intercoder reliability (Kappa) of .91.

Results An overview of the results is given in Table 2. Differences in frequencies between both the first-time viewers and the low-experienced viewers and between the first-time viewers and the high-experienced viewers were tested for significance by Fisher’s exact test.

Pictorial relations The first set of six film clips included combinations of two or three shots that showed the same constellation of persons or objects from different angles with a high degree of visual overlap not only of the background, but also of the object itself. In all cases, all of the high-experienced viewers correctly interpreted the clips as depicting the same persons or objects across the shots, indicating that the film clips were appropriately designed and edited. Also, the majority of low-experienced viewers gave correct interpretations, ranging from 65% to 100%, depending on the particular clip.

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Table 2. Frequency of standard interpretation by type of relation between adjacent shots and by viewing experience

Pictorial relations Different angle (donkey) Different angle (cow) Establishing shot & side view Identity of persons Spatiotemporal relation Establishing shot & front view Identity of persons Spatiotemporal relation Over-the-shoulder dialogue (man and woman) Identity of persons Spatiotemporal relation Over-the-shoulder dialogue (two men) Identity of persons Spatiotemporal relation Causal relations Match-on-action (Passing a bucket) Ongoing activity (tea preparation – consistent; n = 10) Ongoing activity (tea preparation – inconsistent; n = 10) Ongoing activity (woodcutting – consistent; n = 10) Ongoing activity (woodcutting – inconsistent; n = 10) Ongoing activity (milking – inconsistent) Ongoing activity – Inference (washing hands) Conceptual relations Eye-line match up (tree) Eye-line match down (shoes) Inferring intention (stone at dog) Whole/part relation (bird in a tree) Whole/part relation (bee on a flower) Outside/inside relation (mosque with praying man) Outside/inside relation (house with smoking chimney and cooking woman)

First-time viewers (%)

Low-experienced viewers (%)

High-experienced viewers (%)

70 0

100a 95c

100a 100c

100 0

100 95c

100 100c

90 0

100 85c

100 100c

0 0

65c 65c

100c 100c

60 0

100b 100c

100b 100c

90 100

100 100

100 100

0

10

30

100

100

100

0

0

40

5 10

25 80c

90c 100c

100 100 0 5 10 0

100 100 0 80c 70c 60c

100 100 90c 100c 100c 100c

0

60c

100c

Note. Difference to first-time viewers (Fisher’s exact test): ap < .05; bp < .01; cp < .001.

For one of the videos in which a single object (a donkey) was shown from different viewpoints, the majority of the first-time viewers (70%) noticed that the same donkey was shown in both shots. However, the given explanation was wrong: Instead of noticing a change in camera position, they assumed that the donkey itself had changed its position. Also, for the other film (showing a cow), none of the first-time viewers noticed the identity

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of the object across the two shots, interpreting the clips as displaying two different cows in succession. Difficulties of interpretation were also found for videos that depicted a typical conversation scene, showing two people standing face to face. In two of the videos, the scene was shown as a shot-reverse-shot sequence with an over-the-shoulder depiction of the participants. Here, none of the first-time viewers correctly described the continuation of the scene across both shots. In one clip, 60% of the first-time viewers noticed the identity of the persons across the shots, but the change in camera perspective in the reverse shot was incorrectly interpreted as bodily turns of the depicted persons. In the second clip, none of the first-time viewers even noticed the identity of persons across shots. Instead, several of the first-time viewers perceived the back part of the person, which should have helped them to connect the shots, not as the person but as something different. For example, ornaments on the scarf of a woman shown made the participants assume that the man was looking at flowers. Even two videos that began with an establishing shot giving an overview of the whole situation were not intelligible to the first-time viewers. While nearly all of the first-time viewers noticed the identity of the persons across shots, they failed to establish appropriate spatio-temporal coherence. For example, one clip began with an establishing shot showing two men looking at each other, followed by shots of each of them portraying them side-face. A typical interpretation given by a first-time viewer was: ‘There were two men and then one of them disappeared.’ Another film clip showed two men’s front face in the single shots and this time a typical interpretation of the first-time viewers was ‘Two men were standing across from each other and then both turned to this side and looked at us.’ Taken together, the hypothesis that pictorial relations between the shots can help first-time viewers to connect the shots should be qualified. In general, all of the experienced viewers interpreted all of the videos in the intended way, while the first-time viewers showed some characteristic problems of interpretation. On the one hand, for four of the six videos, most of the first-time viewers noticed the identity of the portrayed persons or animals across the shots. Therefore, visual overlap of salient objects seems to help first-time viewers to establish a connection between adjacent shots. But the fact that for two of the six videos, the first-time viewers did not notice the identity of a salient animal or person indicates that visual overlap seems to be a weak and fragile connective. This is consistent with the findings of Schwan and Ildirar (2010) who found that visual overlap in the background scene did not help first-time viewers to comprehend the relation between two shots. Additionally, the present findings indicate that even if the first-time viewers did notice the identity of the main object across two shots, they generally failed to correctly interpret the spatial and temporal relations between the shots. More specifically, the first-time viewers generally seem to assume a fixed camera position and therefore equate changes in perspective with bodily turns of the depicted persons or animals. Thus, beyond noticing the identity of the objects, putting them into appropriate spatio-temporal relation seems to require some familiarity with the conventions of filmic depictions. Interestingly, two of the videos – one of the over-the shoulder clips and one of the establishing shot clips – also posed problems for a substantial proportion of low-experienced viewers, indicating that it takes considerable film experience to consolidate the formal knowledge required for appropriate interpretation.

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Causal relations A second set of film clips included sequences of shots that depicted an ongoing, familiar activity. In all cases, appropriate interpretation required noticing the continuation of a person’s stream of activities. Also, for three of the clips, inconsistent shots inserted into the ongoing familiar activity had to be noticed. For five of seven clips, more than 90% of the experienced viewers provided appropriate interpretations of the films’ content, again indicating that the film clips were appropriately designed and edited. In contrast, for two of the clips containing inconsistent shots (i.e. a close-up shot of the hands of the woman as she was wiping them was edited into the tea preparation clip and a close-up of the shoes of the man was edited into the firewood cutting clip), performance accuracy was low for both high-experienced viewers (30% and 40% respectively), low-experienced viewers (10% and 0% respectively) and first-time viewers (0% in both cases), suggesting that the clips were difficult to interpret even for viewers that are familiar with film conventions. Consistent with previous results (Schwan & Ildirar, 2010), both first-time viewers and low-experienced viewers gave interpretations which showed that they were able to connect the film shots according to the continuing activity, as evidenced by their descriptions of the films showing tea preparation, wood cutting, and passing of a bucket. Yet, despite this ability, both detecting inconsistencies and formulating predicting inferences posed problems to the first-time viewers. The difference between the interpretations of the first-time and the high-experienced viewers were significant in a film clip in which we showed a woman going to milk a cow with a gas can in her hand. While none of the first-time viewers noticed the inconsistency, a great majority of the high-experienced viewers (90%) noticed it. Many of the first-time viewers said that they saw a woman going around and then she reappeared and milked the cow. On the other hand, all of the high-experienced viewers resolved the inconsistency by constructing a narration, which resolved the apparent inconsistency: For example, one of the high-experienced viewers described the scene in the following way: ‘I saw a woman who brought water to wash her cow. She will milk the cow after cleaning it.’ The first-time viewers also did not notice inconsistencies in two other film clips, but both inconsistencies were also only noticed by a minority of the high-experienced viewers. Finally, the vast majority of the first-time viewers was not able to continue a film’s event by making predictive inferences. In the film, a man was shown working with mud and then approaching a faucet, indicating that he was going to wash his hands. Again, all of the high-experienced viewers but only 10% of the first-time viewers provided this prediction. Thus, for four of the clips, first-time and high-experienced viewers gave rather similar interpretations. In particular, for the consistent film versions, both groups correctly described the familiar sequence of events. Also, for two of the versions with inconsistent inserts, both groups largely overlooked the inserted actions that did not fit into the activity sequence, echoing the findings of Levin and Simons (1997). However, for three films, the pattern of interpretation differed significantly between the first-time and the high-experienced viewers, indicating that the first-time viewers were even more susceptible to inconsistencies and also that the high-experienced viewers made predictive inferences, while the first-time viewers did not. Overall, the results indicate that first-time viewers indeed are able to comprehend filmic sequences which portray a familiar event or activity across several shots. But this ability is fragile in the sense that even minor inconsistencies impede the construction of a

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coherent stream of behaviour. Also, while experienced viewers tend to ‘look ahead’ in an ongoing story by constructing predictive inferences (Magliano et al., 1996), first-time viewers’ working memory is possibly too loaded by processing the current state of a film in order to be able to make further predictive inferences.

Conceptual relations A final set of seven clips included sequences of shots that had to be related by the viewers on a conceptual basis. Again, in all cases, nearly all of the high-experienced viewers interpreted the clips in the expected way by inferentially relating adjacent shots, indicating that the film clips were appropriately designed and edited. In two videos, an eye-line match was presented, depicting a person looking in a certain direction, followed by a shot that shows the object of attention. Although the adjacent shots did not visually overlap and also showed no continuing action, all of the first-time viewers nevertheless were able to link them inferentially, saying that they saw a man looking up to a tree and a woman looking down to her shoes. On the other hand, the first-time viewers’ description of the film showing a man looking at a dog and a stone did not conform to the standard interpretation. While the majority of the high-experienced viewers (i.e. 90%) said that man intends to pick up the stone and throw it at the dog, none of the first-time viewers gave this interpretation. Although there was an eye-line match between the shots, they did not even realize that the man and the dog were spatially close to each other. Instead, they interpreted the shots as a sequence of independent pictures of a man, a stone, and a dog. In two videos, a long shot of a scene was followed by a medium close-up of an object in that scene. Since the objects were too small to be seen in the first shot, viewers had to relate both shots semantically.For example, inone video, a large tree was shown in the distance on a hill, followed by a shot of a branch with a bird sitting in it. Here, the intended interpretation would be that the bird is sitting in the tree. For both videos, only a small proportion of the first-time viewers were able to give the appropriate description. Even when prompted by a further question such as ‘Where was the tree in which the bird was sitting?’ most of the first-time viewers could not link the shots and usually gave answers such as ‘I did not see it’ or ‘The tree must be in a forest’. In contrast, all of the high-experienced viewers as well as the low-experienced viewers interpreted the film clips in this group as expected without the need for further questions. A typical example of a description given by a high-experienced viewer was ‘I saw a bird in a tree which was on the hill.’ Finally, in two film clips, a transition was made from an outside view to an inside view. In both cases, the outside was indicative of an object or an activity that was performed inside. For both videos, none of the first-time viewers was able to link shots inferentially and give the appropriate description. This type of videos also posed some problems for a substantial proportion (40%) of the low-experienced viewers, confirming that it takes considerable viewing experience to consolidate the formal knowledge required for appropriate interpretation. Like the previous two hypotheses, also the hypothesis assuming that first-time viewers will be able to inferentially connect semantically related shots has to be qualified. While eye-line matches, which link an observer with his or her object of attention, posed no problems of comprehension for the first-time viewers, different forms of approach, either from distance to close-up, or from outside to inside, could not be appropriately linked. Eye-line matches follow a sequence of views that closely mimicking patterns of joint attention (Castelhano, Wieth, & Henderson, 2007; Moore & Dunham, 1995). Joint

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attention is developed early in infancy, enabling toddlers and young children to connect the mental states of their mother to objects or events in a given situation. They therefore constitute a fundamental mechanism of synchronizing attention with another person, laying ground for perspective change and theories of mind. Accordingly, the first-time viewers seem to have successfully transferred this behavioural pattern to the interpretation of the respective film clips depicting eye-line matches. It should be kept in mind that in the present clips, the shift of attention was made salient because the protagonists looked in a certain direction conspicuously (up or down). In contrast, although the shot-reverse-shot sequences of conversation scenes (see section on visual overlap) can also be interpreted as eye-line matches, they did not contain conspicuous shifts of attention and, therefore, could not be linked appropriately by first-time viewers. Likewise, transitions from distance to close as well as from outside to inside lacked the familiar pattern of shifting attention, therefore requiring a different, possibly more abstract form of bridging inference, which could not be mastered by the first-time viewers and even by a substantial proportion of the low-experienced viewers. Conclusion The main goal of the present study was to investigate how adult first-time viewers deal with various types of shot sequences. In particular, we were interested in finding which kind of commonalities between adjacent shots will be noticed by first-time viewers helping them to establish coherence across shot sequences. We differentiated between three major types of commonalities, namely, pictorial, causal, and conceptual ones. Each type is partly grounded in everyday experiences outside the realm of films and could therefore, at least in principle, be spontaneously used by first-time viewers to link adjacent shots. But on the other hand, some of these commonalities may be perceptually too weak to compensate for visual interruptions caused by film cuts, requiring familiarity with the conventions of films in order to be able to establish coherence across shots. The results of the present study corroborate this notion by showing that, in some cases, first-time viewers did notice commonalities between shots and were able to establish coherence accordingly, while in other cases they failed to do so. More specifically, most of the first-time viewers noticed the identity of persons or animals across shots, provided they were depicted at a salient position in the foreground of the scene. Similarly, activities that spanned several shots were correctly described. Finally, eye-line matches that juxtaposed a person gazing with a second shot depicting the object of attention led also to the correct interpretation of a person looking at the object. This indicates that first-time viewers indeed are able to notice basic pictorial (object identity), causal (chains of activity), as well as conceptual (links between gaze direction and object attention) commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. On the other hand, consistent with the findings of Schwan and Ildirar (2010), first-time viewers’ comprehension of the relations was to a large degree fragile. Although they noticed identity of persons and animals across shots, their interpretation of the spatial and temporal relations between the shots was inappropriate. Changes of camera position were falsely attributed to bodily turns; switches from establishing shots to close-ups of one person were interpreted as the other person has left the scene. Also, with regard to causal relations, inconsistencies were not noticed and re-interpreted (as was done by the experienced viewers) and predictive inferences were not made, indicating a rather superficial understanding of the activity. Finally, with the exception of eye-line matches,

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most of the first-time viewers completely failed to understand conceptual relations between shots; switches from outside to inside views or from long shots to close-ups. Overall, the results suggest that one important difference between first-time and experienced viewers may lie in their conception of the medium ‘film’. Experienced viewers, who have watched movies and TV for a long time on a regular basis, presume that films form a coherent whole and that most of adjacent shots in a film must therefore be semantically related. Hence, even if this relation is not transparent at first sight, or if familiar rules of depiction are violated, experienced viewers nevertheless actively search for meaningful relationships between shots, partly ignoring salient inconsistencies (Germeys & d’Ydewalle, 2007; Levin & Hymel, 2012; Levin & Simons, 1997; Tibus et al., 2013). In contrast, due to their lack of film experience, first-time viewers do not seem to have the notion of films as coherent narratives. Accordingly, they notice salient relations across shots, but they do not routinely engage in active search for commonalities and coherence in cases where salient relations are absent. Hence, even minor variations in the content of a film or its manner of depiction which decrease the salience of the relations between shots may lead to misinterpretations and lack of comprehension. Additionally, both the high overlap between low-experienced and high-experienced viewers and the marked differences between novice viewers and low-experienced viewers regarding the interpretation of most of the videos indicate that this fundamental change in the basic understanding of the medium ‘film’ occurs even after a short period of watching films in an irregular and infrequent manner. Do keep in mind that novice viewers and low-experienced viewers were particularly similar with regard to cultural background, age, and educational level. Therefore, it is highly probable that the observed differences between the two groups can indeed be attributed to differences in viewing experience. Nevertheless, for future studies, it would be interesting to also take proximal perceptual and cognitive variables (such as spatial abilities) into consideration. Taken together, the findings corroborate and extend previous findings on the interpretation of films by first-time viewers (Hobbs et al., 1988; Schwan & Ildirar, 2010), showing that film comprehension is not an ‘all or nothing’ process that is either solely based on natural perception or requires elaborate knowledge of filmic conventions as necessary precondition. Instead, it should be conceived of interplay of three factors, namely, noticing commonalities across shots on the grounds of similarities with natural perception, the notion that films generally consist of sequences of shots which are linked in coherent ways, and knowledge of design principles and conventions of film acquired through extended film experiences. While the first and third factors have been discussed in literature, the role of a general understanding of films as coherent narratives has not received much attention to date. Conceiving films as coherent narratives provides an appropriate interpretive schema that motivates viewers to actively look for meaningful relations between shots, even if salient connections or overlaps are absent or cinematic principles such as the 180° rule are violated (Germeys & d’Ydewalle, 2007; Tibus et al., 2013). In contrast, viewers that do not possess this notion may notice salient connections (such as identity of objects or ongoing activities across shots) but may miss more subtle relations that would require building elaborative inferences (such as the relation between a particular type of building and activities going on in that building). Further research is needed to determine the role of this third factor, for instance, by explaining the notion of coherence to first-time viewers prior to film presentation.

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Acknowledgements This study was supported by Turkish National Science Foundation TUBITAK. Project Number: 110K059.

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Supporting Information The following supporting information may be found in the online edition of the article: Video S1 Film clips used in the evaluations.

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