question: when you watch a movie for the second time, why do you notice things you didn’t notice the first time?
comment: Your brain can predict what’s coming because it’s familiar and this frees up more space to focus on new details.
passages: According to Event Segmentation Theory (EST), the perception of event boundaries is a side effect of prediction during ongoing perception. Prediction is an adaptive mechanism made up of cognitive event models that represent “what is going on now” to create expectations and attentive biases for ongoing processing. Prediction errors occur at situational changes and cause information processing segmentation.
   In one study, observers were instructed to look at short movies involving changes in point of view. They used 15 movie clips featuring a handbag, whose properties (color, position, identity, and shape) were manipulated across cuts. Observers' reactions were recorded by examining eye-movement, changes in behavior and memory performance. The researchers later asked the observers if they had noticed anything unusual occur during the clips, without directly referring to the handbag. Changing the position of objects, i.e. the handbag, between scenes was the only variable that did not appear to affect eye-movement or memory. Overall, observers were more likely to draw their attention and look sooner at the handbag-stimulus at the moment right after its properties changed. When specifically asked about it, they were more likely to describe the handbag in terms of its post-cut properties, after a change had occurred. Even though their visual system appeared to pick up on the changes, observers were not consciously aware of them or able to report noticeable differences across cuts. The results illustrate that observers construct and maintain internal visual representations of complex visual environments while viewing dynamic scenes. This also helps explain why movie viewers usually are not aware of continuity errors in editing.
   When viewing pieces of art in an experiment, participants in a solo context rated art in an improving sequence significantly higher than when the targets are presented in a declining sequence. When viewing the art in a joint context, participants evaluated the first and last pieces similarly in both kinds of sequence. Simply priming viewers to feel like they were in solo or joint contexts or to process analytically or holistically was enough to produce the same viewing effects.
  
  Section::::Cultural influences.
  
  Section::::Cultural influences.:Individualism versus collectivism.
   The brief representation in iconic memory is thought to play a key role in the ability to detect change in a visual scene. The phenomenon of change blindness has provided insight into the nature of the iconic memory store and its role in vision. Change blindness refers to an inability to detect differences in two successive scenes separated by a very brief blank interval, or interstimulus interval (ISI). As such change blindness can be defined as being a slight lapse in iconic memory. When scenes are presented without an ISI, the change is easily detectable. It is thought that the detailed memory store of the scene in iconic memory is erased by each ISI, which renders the memory inaccessible. This reduces the ability to make comparisons between successive scenes.
   Broader narrative comprehension theories have also been applied to the perception and memory of movies. This reflects the hypothesis that the same mechanisms are used to understanding stories and real life. In one study, researchers illustrated the common episodic structure between text and film, by asking participants to match a constructed text story to the dialogueless movie The Red Balloon. This task required participants to locate episodes and their components within the cinematic story: exposition, complication and resolution.
  
  Section::::Top-down factors.:Eye-movement.
   Section::::Neural circuitry.:CS-US convergence in the cerebellum.
   Presumably, the film industry has capitalized on the results of previous psychological research that shows motion and the onset of motion capture our attention.
  
  Finally, films have become darker over time, as the overall brightness of the images on the movie screen has decreased.
  
  These changes in film-making choices increase attention manipulation and are thought to facilitate comprehension.
  
  Section::::Top-down factors.
  
  Top-down factors refer to expectations and background knowledge that influence viewers' perception, understanding and appreciation of film. Expertise, attention and eye-movements are top-down factors that guide how viewers experience film.
  
  Section::::Top-down factors.:Expertise and awareness of audience manipulation.
   Section::::Sensory Features.:Sequence of events.
   These traits come to the fore in "Hi, Mom!"'s "Be Black, Baby" sequence. This sequence parodies cinéma vérité, the dominant documentary tradition of the 1960s, while simultaneously providing the audience with a visceral and disturbingly emotional experience. De Palma describes the sequence as a constant invocation of Brechtian distanciation: "First of all, I am interested in the medium of film itself, and I am constantly standing outside and making people aware that they are always watching a film. At the same time I am evolving it. In "Hi, Mom!" for instance, there is a sequence where you are obviously watching a ridiculous documentary and you are told that and you are aware of it, but it still sucks you in. There is a kind of Brechtian alienation idea here: you are aware of what you are watching at the same time that you are emotionally involved with it."
   Paralleling the original example, the CBeebies show "Mr Bloom's Nursery", a UK TV programme featuring Ben Faulks in the title role, became popular with a mature female audience.
  
  Section::::Positives and negatives of the effect.
   Section::::Evidence of constructive perception.
  
  Context effects are not explained by bottom-up theories of accounting. Irving Biederman performed experiments that demonstrated dramatic context effects. For example, Stephen Palmer carried out an experiment in which the participants were asked to identify objects after they were shown either a relevant or irrelevant context. They might be shown a scene of a baseball game, followed by images of a baseball, car, and a phone. The stimuli that was most relevant to the context, the baseball, was recognized quicker than those that were irrelevant, car and phone.
   Section::::Perception research.
   One study compared the participants’ ability to understand narrative in Hollywood versus experimental film, by measuring interpretational awareness. Subjects with significant, moderate and no formal background or experience in film viewed a film that contained both scenes with Hollywood-style and experimental-style editing. Regardless of expertise level, participants described the Hollywood-like scenes in “naturalistic terms,” as if their events had occurred in reality and tended not to make explicit references to stylistic techniques. This interpretational tendency reflects Hollywood’s “invisible style.” When describing the experimental scenes, inexperienced viewers struggled to construct a cohesive “naturalistic” narrative. More experienced viewers were more likely to make explicit reference to the “breaking of conventions” and the intentions behind them.
   It is considered to be an automatic and ongoing process that depends on meaningful changes in a perceived situation. To test this, researchers measured brain activity while participants viewed an extended narrative film. They used MRI scanning to show transient evoked brain responses (changes in brain activity) at those points they identified as event boundaries (changes in situation). Situational changes were coded frame by frame into spatial, temporal, object, character, causal and goal changes. Participants were then instructed to perform an event segmentation task by watching a movie and pressing a button to identify units of activity that were natural and meaningful to them. Paying attention to situational changes gives rise to a neural cascade that is consciously perceived at the end of one event and the beginning of another.
   Soderbergh cites Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film "Don't Look Now" as the primary influence on how he approached the love scene between Foley and Sisco: "What I wanted to create in our movie was the intimacy of that, the juxtaposition of these two contrasting things ... We had to mix it up and have you feel like you were more in their heads."
   The Pulfrich effect may likewise be partly explained in this manner, though the actual temporal changes from frame to frame in the films prepared for viewing with the Pulfrich effect do in fact provide some dimensional information to the brain. However, even where no temporal changes are evident in objects in the films being viewed with the Pulfrich effect, the brain appears to apply some depth perception to those areas of the film anyway, as if artificially compensating in a manner that inserts dimensional data where no stereoscopic-like changes are actually available. This may be related to the same processes in the brain that produce the Van Hare Effect.
   BULLET::::2. The duration of visible persistence is inversely related to stimulus luminance. When the luminance, or brightness of a stimulus is increased, the duration of visible persistence decreases. Due to the involvement of the neural system, visible persistence is highly dependent on the physiology of the photoreceptors and activation of different cell types in the visual cortex. This visible representation is subject to masking effects whereby the presentation of interfering stimulus during, or immediately after stimulus offset interferes with one's ability to remember the stimulus.
   Section::::CS-US contingency.:The delay and trace procedures.
  
  In delay EBC, the CS onset precedes the US onset and the two stimuli overlap and coterminate, with the stimuli converging in the cerebellar cortex and interpositus nucleus. In the trace EBC, the CS precedes the US and there is a stimulus free period (trace interval) between CS offset and US onset. While both of these procedures require the cerebellum, the trace procedure also requires the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex.
  
  Section::::Neural circuitry.
  
  Section::::Neural circuitry.:The blink reflex.
   There are particular factors which affect where eye movements fixate upon, these include bottom-up factors inherent to the stimulus, and top-down factors inherent to the viewer. Even an initial glimpse of a scene has been found to generate an abstract representation of the image that can be stored in memory for use in subsequent eye movements (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007).
   Schwan & Ildirar (2010), who focused solely on inexperienced viewers’ ability to comprehend film, found that the comprehensibility of films was determined by whether or not they followed a familiar line of action. Overall, our brains accept the perceptual discontinuities found in films, but it is ultimately easier for viewers, regardless of their experience, to understand cuts that follow a continuous and familiar line of action as opposed to ones that are more discontinuous. When a familiar line is not present, more experienced viewers are significantly better at comprehending a complex narrative by “filtering” out editing discontinuities. In the end, however, montage linearity that creates temporal continuity is more important than plot for recall and understanding of a narrative’s events.
   Alcohol consumption and belief of consumption influenced emotion detection in ten second clips. Participants who thought they had consumed an alcoholic beverage rated one facial expression (approximately 3% of the facial expressions they saw) more in each clip as happy compared to the control group. Thus, impression formation may be affected by even the perception of alcohol consumption.
  
  Section::::Neuroscience.:Cross-cultural differences.
   Bluth noted Gustaf Tenggren, whom Walt Disney actively recruited to work on the breakthrough film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" as being a big inspiration throughout his career. When asked how he approached each of his watercolor masterpieces, Toby described his intent as
  
  Creating the moment that you think you saw ... How one remembers a film is often different from the actual film itself.
   Section::::Modifiers.
  
  Familiarity, transfer-appropriate processing, the self-reference effect, and the explicit nature of a stimulus modify the levels-of-processing effect by manipulating mental processing depth factors.
  
  Section::::Modifiers.:Familiarity.
   Section::::History.
  
  Although these studies began in the 2000s, this idea has been around since the early years of film. This is demonstrated with Sergei Eisenstein’s experiments with montage theory and Lev Kuleshov’s famous “Kuleshov Effect”. These Russian filmmakers studied American filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith and discovered that film was a “malleable” art. The Kuleshov Effect proved that the juxtaposition of a series of images together can create ideas and emotions in an audience’s mind. This revolutionized propaganda in the Soviet Union to spread the influence the collective strength of a new Marxist state after the revolution of 1917.
   Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we assess its truth-value. If we are really "into" the fiction – "transported", in the psychologists' term – we are, as Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, "disinterested". We respond aesthetically, without purpose. We don't judge the truth of what we're perceiving, even though if we stop being transported and think about it, we know quite well it's a fiction.
  