Abstract
Fractal patterns are seemingly everywhere. They can be analyzed through Fourier and power analyses, and other methods. Cutting, DeLong, and Nothelfer (2010) analyzed as time-series data the fluctuations of shot durations in 150 popular movies released over 70 years. They found that these patterns had become increasingly fractal-like and concluded that they might be linked to those found in the results of psychological tasks involving attention. To explore this possibility further, we began by analyzing the shot patterns of almost twice as many movies released over a century. The increasing fractal-like nature of shot patterns is affirmed, as determined by both a slope measure and a long-range dependence measure, neither of which is sensitive to the vector lengths of their inputs within the ranges explored here. But the main reason for increased long-range dependence is related to, but not caused by, the increasing vector length of the shot-series samples. It appears that, in generating increasingly fractal-like patterns, filmmakers have systematically explored dimensions that are important for holding our attention—shot durations, scene durations, motion, and sound amplitude—and have crafted fluctuations in them like those of our endogenous attention patterns. Other dimensions—luminance, clutter, and shot scale—are important to film style but their variations seem not to be important to holding viewers’ moment-to-moment attention and have not changed in their fractional dimension over time.
Highlights
The photoplay ... will become more than any other art the domain of the psychologist who analyzes the workings of the mind
Hugo Münsterberg was an applied psychologist who, late in his life, became infatuated with the -new art form of photoplays; we call them movies. He exhorted psychologists to study and to make movies for the purposes of exploring the human mind. It appears that no professional psychologist followed his Cutting et al Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (2018) 3:8 suggestion, perhaps largely because there were few tools and little technology available to undertake such a scientific study
The regression trend, with its 95% confidence interval, is quite strong (adjusted R2 = 0.15, t(261) = 6.78, p < 0.0001, d = 0.84), replicating Cutting (2014c)
Summary
Hugo Münsterberg was an applied psychologist who, late in his life, became infatuated with the -new art form of photoplays; we call them movies. He exhorted psychologists to study and to make movies for the purposes of exploring the human mind. Münsterberg was certainly correct to suggest that movies could be used to study the mind (see, for example, Bezdek et al, 2015; Hasson, Malach, & Heeger, 2009; Levin & Baker, 2017; Magliano & Zacks, 2011) but likely wrong to separate the laws of the mind from those of the external world
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