John Hutson

Georgia State University | GSU · Department of Learning Sceinces

Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) posits that understanding picture stories depends upon a coordination of two processes: (1) integrating new information into the current event model that is coherent with it (i.e., mapping) and (2) segmenting experiences into distinct event models (i.e., shifting). In two experiments, we inves...

Your understanding of what you see now surely influences what you will look at next. Yet this simple concept has only recently begun to be systematically studied and elaborated within theoretical frameworks. The Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) distinguishes between front-end and back-end processes that occur while viewers perc...

When people see political advertisements on a polarized issue they take a stance on, what factors influence how they respond to and remember the adverts contents? Across three studies, we tested competing hypotheses about how individual differences in social vigilantism (i.e., attitude superiority) and need for cognition relate to intentions to res...

Viewers’ attentional selection while looking at scenes is affected by both top‐down and bottom‐up factors. However, when watching film, viewers typically attend to the movie similarly irrespective of top‐down factors—a phenomenon we call the tyranny of film. A key difference between still pictures and film is that film contains motion, which is a s...

This study tested the role of the audio soundtrack in the opening scene of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (Orson Welles and Albert Zugsmith, 1958) in supporting a predictive inference that a time bomb will explode, as the filmmakers intended. We designed two experiments and interpreted their results using the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension...

In a previous study, DeLeeuw and Mayer (2008) found support for the triarchic model of cognitive load (Sweller, Van Merriënboer, & Paas, 1998, 2019) by showing that three different metrics could be used to independently measure 3 hypothesized types of cognitive load: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane. However, 2 of the 3 metrics that the authors u...

What role do moment‐to‐moment comprehension processes play in visual attentional selection in picture stories? The current work uniquely tested the role of bridging inference generation processes on eye movements while participants viewed picture stories. Specific components of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) were tested...

Cognitive load theory (CLT) provides us guiding principles in the design of learning materials. CLT differentiates three different kinds of cognitive load -- intrinsic, extraneous and germane load. Intrinsic load is related to the learning goal, extraneous load costs cognitive resources but does not contribute to learning. Germane load can foster l...

Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers’ attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bottom-up) or the viewer (top-down) is more important in determining how we watch movies. Reading research has shown a strong connection betwee...

This paper briefly sketches out the Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) and reports on tests of the theory in a series of studies using the “Boy, Dog, Frog” (BDF) wordless picture stories (e.g., Mayer 1969). SPECT is an integrative framework synthesizing a number of theories from the areas of scene perception, event perception, an...

Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers’ attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (Bottom-up) or the viewer (Top-down) is more important in determining how we watch movies. Reading research has shown a strong connection betwee...

The current study investigated attentional selection during bridging inference generation in wordless visual sequential narratives. Comprehension processes, such as inference generation, have shown clear effects on eye-movements in reading, and more recently modest effects in studies with video and sequential narratives. Two competing hypotheses we...

The current study investigated attentional selection during bridging inference generation in wordless visual sequential narratives. Comprehension processes, such as inference generation, have shown clear effects on eye-movements in reading, and more recently modest effects in studies with video and sequential narratives. Two competing hypotheses we...

High temperatures have been documented to affect behavior in a variety of ways depending on the nature of the task. We extended this prior research by examining the effects of dynamically changing temperature on various aspects of performance in a video game task. In the span of approximately an hour, temperature was gradually increased, stayed con...

During reading, eye-movements are closely related to comprehension, but the opposite has been shown in film viewing. Recent studies have shown that the high attentional synchrony found during film viewing may leave little room for comprehension based eye-movement differences. We therefore tested the following two competing hypotheses: 1) The Cognit...

During reading, eye-movements are closely related to comprehension, but the opposite has been shown in film viewing. Recent studies have shown that the high attentional synchrony found during film viewing may leave little room for comprehension based eye-movement differences. We therefore tested the following two competing hypotheses: 1) The Cognit...

Transfer of learning is an important objective of education. However, students usually have difficulties in solving physics transfer tasks even after having solved similar problems previously. We investigated if instruction provided using videos containing detailed explanations of previously solved problems will improve students' performance in tac...

Research has shown that visual cues can facilitate problem solving by helping direct students' attention to relevant areas of a diagram. We investigate the effect of visual cues and outcome feedback on students' visual attention while solving conceptual physics problems containing a diagram. Students (N=89) enrolled in introductory mechanics course...

During reading there is a strong relationship between eye-movements and comprehension, but does this extend to the ubiquitous activity of watching movies? In four experiments we tested two competing hypotheses: H1) Mental Model: viewers' narrative comprehension guides their visual attention, versus H2) Tyranny of Film: Attentional synchrony across...

The current study investigates the process of generating bridging inferences while viewing visual sequential narratives. Using a series of children’s wordless sequential narratives, we created ellipses, in which during selected 3-image sequences, a highly inferrable action in the middle of the sequence was either shown or missing. Previously, we fo...

Movies are ubiquitous and rapidly understood, but how does this occur? Voluminous reading research has investigated eye-movement/comprehension relationships, but do these relationships hold for film comprehension? We hypothesized film viewers' narrative event models would guide their attention while watching films. To test this, we manipulated the...

Previous work has shown that event representations are constructed in a coarse-to-fine fashion (Larson, Hendry, & Loschky, 2012). Specifically, an event’s superordinate scene category was recognized first (Indoor or Outdoor), followed by its basic level scene category (Kitchen or Office), and then its basic level action category (Cooking or Washing...