Lester Loschky, Kansas State University – Moviegoers and Eye Movements

Next time you watch a movie, try to control your eyes.

Lester Loschky, associate professor in the department of psychological sciences at Kansas State University, examines how Hollywood directors have become masters at telling our eyes where to look when watching a film.

Lester C. Loschky is an Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at Kansas State University.  He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  His work is concerned with visual cognition and scene perception, from both a perceptual and a cognitive viewpoint, and its real world applications.  His research emphases are on the relationships between eye movements, attention, and higher-level cognitive processes, with applications in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-assisted instruction (CAI), and educational applications of better understanding the processes involved in visual narrative perception and comprehension.

Moviegoers and Eye Movements

Hollywood filmmakers have developed stimuli that are amazing at directing the viewers’ attention from moment to moment in exactly the way they want.

My colleagues and I wanted to know whether a person’s understanding of a film can overcome the filmmaker’s tyrannical control over their gaze and allow them to look elsewhere on the screen. Surprisingly, we showed only very subtle differences in the eye movements among participants who had completely different understandings of the film.

We compared eye movements of people who watched a three-minute clip of “Moonraker,” a 1979 James Bond film, with people who only watched the last 12 seconds of the clip. To establish a difference in understanding, we asked participants at the pinnacle moment to predict what would happen next in the film. People who watched the longer segment were more than twice as likely to immediately predict the next scene than people who only watched the shorter segment.

Then we recorded viewers’ eye movements to compare how many viewers looked at the same thing at the same time and if it differed based on their understanding. When we looked at the overall pattern, the eye movements among the groups looked virtually identical, supporting the idea that the filmmaker generally has strong control over where we look. However, close examination of the critical moment at which viewers differed in the prediction they made revealed subtle gaze differences.

Our research suggests that the way you watch a movie is generally not influenced by what you comprehend. Filmmakers may have great control over how we watch a movie but this does not necessarily mean they have control over what we think.

Read More:

PLOS One: What Would Jaws Do? The Tyranny of Film and the Relationship between Gaze and Higher-Level Narrative Film Comprehension

Moonraker film clip: Context condition: https://youtu.be/WJUQwLm3W3w

Moonraker film clip: No-context condition: https://youtu.be/Ci7zkM_xTJI

Research page: http://www.k-state.edu/psych/research/loschkylester.html
Kansas State University, Visual Cognition Laboratory page: www.k-state.edu/psych/vcl/index.html