“This Ticking Noise in My Head”
How Sound Design, Dialogue, Event Structure, and Viewer Working Memory Interact in the Comprehension of Touch of Evil (1958)
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Abstract
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 Theory (SPECT). Across both experiments, viewers watched the scene, we manipulated their knowledge of the bomb, and they made a predictive inference just before the bomb would explode. Experiment 1 found that the likelihood of predicting the explosion decreased when the soundtrack was absent. Experiment 2 showed that individual differences in working memory accounted for variability in generating the prediction when the soundtrack was absent. We explore the implications for filmmaking in general.
Contributor Notes
John P. Hutson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Research on the Challenges of Acquiring Language & Literacy at Georgia State University. His research uses an interdisciplinary approach combining cognitive, social, and educational psychology to examine relationships between visual attention and high-level cognitive processes in videos (movies and advertisements), picture stories, and multimedia educational environments. E-mail: jhutson@gsu.edu
Joseph P. Magliano is a professor of Educational Psychology in the Department of Learning Sciences at Georgia State University. He studies the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of media, such as texts, comics, and films. He uses a variety of empirical approaches in his program of research, such as think aloud protocols, time responses, and event segmentation judgment. He assesses the convergence in these approaches to learn about the nature of comprehension. He also studies what it means to be ready to read for school, and in particular, college and how to support underprepared college readers. E-mail: jmagliano@gsu.edu
Tim J. Smith 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 (www.cinelabresearch.com). His research covers all aspects of visual cognition with a special focus on the active perception of real and mediated scenes (e.g., TV and Film) via eye movements. E-mail: tj.smith@bbk.ac.uk
Lester Loschky is Professor of Psychological Sciences at Kansas State University, heads the Visual Cognition Laboratory there (www.k-state.edu/psych/vcl). His research areas include: real-world scene perception, human-computer interaction, and perception and comprehension of visual narratives (in film, picture stories, and VR). He studies the interactions between perception, attention, memory, and comprehension processes. To test hypotheses from the Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT), he investigates how viewers’ comprehension of what they see (their current event model) influences (1) the process of information extraction during each eye fixation, and (2) what viewers selectively attend to through each eye movement. E-mail: loschky@ksu.edu