Perceiving Versus Scrutinizing: Viewers Do Not Default to Awareness of Small Spatiotemporal Inconsistencies in Movie Edits.

Although several research programs have explored how people track changes in objects over time, it is not clear how consistently people are aware of the precise state of dynamic scenes. The importance of object tracking is put to a particularly interesting test in cinema, where editors must combine different views of dynamically changing objects (such as actors) in a way that does not disrupt viewers' perceptual experience. Film editors' intuition and several recent studies suggest that viewers precisely track configuration changes over time and that temporal overlaps in the depiction of moving objects facilitates viewers' perception of smooth visual event continuity. We tested these hypotheses by showing large numbers of participants short edited films that varied in temporal matching between views. In several experiments, we found that participants judged a wide range of temporal overlaps (from 400 ms overlaps to 400 ms ellipses) to be equally continuous. Participants did judge 1-second ellipses to be less smooth than exact matches, and when they repeatedly scrutinized films, or compared different versions of the same films, participants discriminated between exact matches and smaller mismatches. We conclude that awareness of temporal mismatches does not always occur by default, and that the importance of precise temporal matching may be overestimated in cinema and in psychological study of event perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]