04. October 2017 : Top-down information influences eye movements quickly after movie cuts

How are eye movements affected by movie cuts? These two studies demonstrate the influence of top-down information, i.e. the task:
Valuch et al.
Seywerth et al.

These studies explored the task influence of on eye movements in dynamic edited scenes. When task relevant, matching regions across cuts are fixated earlier and more often. Participants with viewing intentions made more and earlier fixations on scene regions that matched across cuts, compared to nonmatching scene regions. However, in control tasks, not even a minor bias to new parts of the stimuli is observed. Thus, visual similarity has a facilitatory influence on how rapidly and effectively viewers are able to actively deploy their attention to a movie's continuation following a cut.