Hosted by the Bristol Vision Institute (BVI)

(Postponed from 4 November 2022)

Abstract: Globally, adults spend 44-64% of their waking lives engaging with audiovisual (AV) media (e.g. film, TV, video, games, apps, etc) with screen time increasing year-on-year especially in children, including infants and toddlers. AV media’s successful permeation into all aspects of modern life presents interesting psychological questions about how AV media has evolved to fit the cognitive skills of viewers and whether, in turn cognition is impacted by prolonged exposure to AV media, especially during early development. Focussing on viewer attention, in this talk I will review a series of studies in which we demonstrate a) how changes in AV media composition over the last century (e.g. cinematography and editing) have optimised consistency in viewer attention, b) how intensification of such compositional factors immediately impair viewer executive control of attention in children and c) how we are using randomised controlled trials to test the direct impact of AV media on individual differences in attention control in children.

Biography: Tim J. Smith BSc. Hons, PhD. is Professor of Cognitive Psychology in the Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, and head of the Cognition in Naturalistic Environments (CINE) Lab within the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development. He studied Artificial Intelligence and Psychology (Joint Honours) in Edinburgh and completed a PhD in the School of Informatics in which he developed ‘An Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity'. He applies empirical Cognitive Psychology methods including eye tracking, Virtual Reality, psychophysiology and fNIRS to questions of Media Cognition and has published widely on the subject both in Psychology and Film journals across projects funded by ESRC, EPSRC, Wellcome, Nuffield Foundation, BIAL, Royal Society and Leverhulme Trust. As a board member of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) and action editor for Projections: The Journal of Movies and the Mind he promotes research at the intersection of Science and Media both in academia and in industry, collaborating with Dreamworks Animation, BBC, Channel 4, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.