Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 16(3), Aug 2022, 400-408; doi:10.1037/aca0000344
Visual continuity is a substantial building block of cinema. Many authors provide definitions of cinematic continuity, and theories attempting to account for it have been proposed both in the more traditional film studies literature, and in the more cognitively based empirical literature. However, as of yet no systematic attempt has been made to empirically assess the experience of continuity across different individuals and across variations in the cinematic structure of scenes. This article constitutes a first step in that direction; it reports the results of two experiments that test whether the experience of cinematic continuity can both reflect differences in integrative cinematic cues and predict viewer’s interpretation of cinematic events. Participants viewed short clips that varied in the degree to which they provided traditional continuity cues to support the interpretation that one actor was looking off-screen at another actor. After viewing the clips, participants completed a 9-item questionnaire assessing their experience of perceptual and conceptual continuity, and also indicated whether they perceived one actor’s look off-screen as a look at another actor shown in the subsequent shot. Results demonstrate that differences in the strength of continuity cues between scenes are reflected in experienced continuity, and that individual differences in experienced continuity effectively predict interpretations of off-screen looks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)