DIEM and thanks for all the hits

My guest post on David Bordwell's blog last week was a roaring success. I could never have imagined that it would capture the interest of so many people across so many disciplines. You can get a sense of the interest by looking at the comments and statistics for the main eye movement video. In the week the post has been up it has been viewed 145,000 times and pages embedding the video have been read 728,000 times! The video cropped up on twitter (thanks Roger Ebert and others), facebook, numerous blogs, websites and newspapers. I am incredibly happy that my research reached out to film makers, theorists, and eager consumers to inform their appreciation of film. Hopefully, you can all now get a sense of how miraculous and complex our perception of film is and how we can inform our understanding by applying methods from empirical psychology.

I plan to build on the momentum created by the blog post by posting similar cognitive readings of films here on my own blog. In the meantime, I can point you to my existing publications on the topic:

For information on the Dynamic Images and Eye Movement project (DIEM) and its analysis of the influence of visual and cinematic features on how we watch movies as presented in my analysis of There Will Be Blood, check out:

Mital, P.K., Smith, T. J., Hill, R. and Henderson, J. M. (in press) Clustering of gaze during dynamic scene viewing is predicted by motion. Cognitive Computation

On how we perceive film and the issues related to continuity, read: Smith, T.J. (2010) Film (Cinema) Perception. In E.B. Goldstein (ed.)The Sage Encyclopedia of Perception.

On the illusion of the "invisible edit" and how it relates to natural attentional shifts when watching film, see: Smith, T.J. and Henderson, J.M. (2008). Edit Blindness: The relationship between attention and global change blindness in dynamic scenes. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 2(2):6, 1-17.

Finally, if you want to see more of the DIEM eye movement videos, new videos as they are created and download the analysis software (i.e. CARPE) go to the DIEM project page and subscribe to our Vimeo channel. As a taster, here is a showreel from the DIEM videos. Enjoy!