Ayse Candan Simsek

IWM Leibniz Institute for Wissensmedien

We examined whether dynamic images benefit memory when visual resources are limited. Almost all previous research in this area has used static photographs to examine viewers’ memory for image content, description, or visual attributes. Here, we investigated the short-term retention of brief stimuli using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) with...

We investigated historical trends of mean shot durations in about 9400 English-­‐ language and 1550 non-­‐English-­‐language movies released from 1912 to 2013. For the sound-­‐era movies of both sets we found little evidence for anything other than a linear decline plotted on a logarithmic scale, with the English-­‐language set providing stronger r...

We selected 24 Hollywood movies released from 1940 through 2010 to serve as a film corpus. Eight viewers, three per film, parsed them into events, which are best termed subscenes. While watching a film a second time, viewers scrolled through frames and recorded the frame number where each event began. Viewers agreed about 90% of the time. We then a...

We measured 160 English-language films released from 1935 to 2010 and found four changes. First, shot lengths have gotten shorter, a trend also reported by others. Second, contemporary films have more motion and movement than earlier films. Third, in contemporary films shorter shots also have proportionately more motion than longer shots, whereas t...

While watching someone kicking a ball, missing moments of ball contact can be incorrectly identified as seen if the event is continued in a causal manner (i.e., the ball flying off). Does event completion also occur for events of a larger scale such as having breakfast (macro-event), which consists of multiple sub-steps like toasting bread (micro-e...

Objective: Given the loss of direct nature contact due to urbanisation and demonstrated psychological benefits of nature, the question arises as to whether direct nature contact can be virtually substituted or supplemented in the elderly living in isolation from nature. Although a number of studies have demonstrated the restorative effects of virtu...

We engage with at least one type of visual media on a daily basis. Among those, there is a growing interest in the perception of cinematic events among cognitive psychologists. The current study investigated how event boundaries and pace affect recognition memory for movie scenes. We presented participants with brief clips composed out of six shots...

Viewpoint dependency in dynamic events is still an open question. Movies present a unique case of complex visual stimuli where consecutive shots are filmed from multiple viewpoints. In the present study, we have examined whether people remember viewpoint-specific information in movie-like visual scenes. We have used naturalistic activities which in...

Achieving a meaningful continuity is critical to perceiving daily life events. We are faced with abundance of information on a daily basis that extends in time and space. We tend to process that information by forming coherent units that are interconnected. The concept of an ‘event’is generally defined as a coherent unit of activity, which has a we...

People divide their ongoing experience into meaningful events. This process, event segmentation, is strongly associated with visual input: when visual features change, people are more likely to segment. However, the nature of this relationship is unclear. Segmentation could be bound to specific visual features, such as actor posture. Or, it could b...

An RSVP study investigating short-term retention of dynamic images

We compare the processing of transitive sentences in young learners of a strict word order language (English) and two languages that allow noun omissions and many variant word orders: Turkish, a case-marked language, and Mandarin Chinese, a non case-marked language. Children aged 1–3 years listened to simple transitive sentences in the typical word...