Attention While Watching Movies

The study of attention while engaged in the prolonged activity of watching movies

The talk will present research from Stephen Hinde’s recently submitted PhD thesis. Stephen is currently spending 3 months with IMC working on the Play Track project. His thesis re-examines popular theories of attention grounded in cognitive psychology by watching people watching film. Previous studies of attention largely used the laboratory timed trial, which is known have issues of ecological validity.  Three topics are examined. Firstly, models of attentional capacity. Secondly, oculomotor capture. Lastly, individual differences. It was concluded that using film to study attention allows richer and more ecologically valid results to the laboratory timed trial, and that attention can only be understood in relationship to prolonged experiences, such as watching film.

An overview of the first two thesis topics, studies of attentional capacity and studies of oculomotor capture, will be presented in the talk. Lastly, some future research directions addressing the problems of invariance will be outlined. In how experimental psychology can leverage mobile device technologies and ethnographic methods to move experiments into ecologically valid real world settings. 

Contact Stephen Hinde, Research Assistant IMC, Stephen.Hinde.06@bristol.ac.uk