Ithaca College

Grant Brighter ('19) and Nancy Rader, PhD publish a paper entitled "Establishing Shot Type Affects Arousal and Cognitive Load During Transitions Between Novel Interior Locations in Films" in the Journal  Frontiers in Human Neuroscience . 

The study investigates how effective four types of establishing shots are at helping viewers process location shifts. An “establishing shot” prefaces a scene in a movie with a wide shot of the scene’s location to help viewers process a shift to a new location.The study utilized a brain-imaging modality known as Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and eye-tracking technology to assess cognitive workload and arousal in response to editing techniques in films. The results suggest differences between pupil diameter and fNIRS in terms of the psychological phenomenon they measure, and may inform the design of future films.

This study was conducted as Brighter's Honors Thesis in Psychology and it shows the quality of research students in psychology engage in with under the mentorship  of our faculty.

The paper can be found here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00003/full"