Perceiving movement across film edits: A psychocinematic analysis.
Arthur P. Shimamura, Brendan I. Cohn‐Sheehy, Thomas A. Shimamura · Psychology of Aesthetics Creativity and the Arts · 2013
Film editors have developed techniques that create seamless, virtually invisible, shot transitions. One technique is the match-action edit in which a cut occurs in the middle of an action. We assessed the way smooth movement is perceived across such edits. Participants viewed an action (e.g., woman drinking a mug) that included an edit that either ran in real time (straight cut), jumped ahead in time, or overlapped the action. When asked to select the clip with the smoothest movement, participants chose clips that contained a brief overlap in action (125 ms). When a pattern mask was inserted between shots, the overlap bias persisted and even occurred when the same camera angle was used across the edit. These findings suggest that film edits disrupt cognitive processing such that viewers act as if they are momentarily “blind” and must be shown a repetition of the action to perceive smooth movements.