The test simultaneously screens for difficulties with vision, movement, and comprehension and ascertains whether the subject can follow simple instructions.
Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye movements and comprehension, and scene perception studies have shown strong effects of viewing tasks on eye movements, but such idiosyncratic top-down control of gaze in film would be anathema to the universal control mainstream filmmakers typically aim for.
It may be that narrative film has properties that affect eye movements during comprehension in such a way that the nature of the eye mind connection is different than how it is manifested in text comprehension.
This suggests that the processes by which information is extracted through eye movements may differ between film narratives and reading (Magliano et al., 2013), as seen in the general dissociation between eye movements and comprehension in our study.
Thus, in two experiments we tested whether the eye movements and comprehension relationship similarly held in a classic film example, the famous opening scene of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (Welles & Zugsmith, Touch of Evil, 1958).
To better understand these relationships between eye movements and comprehension during film viewing, further studies need to combine theories and methods from the fields of scene perception, event perception, and narrative comprehension (Loschky, Hutson, Magliano, Larson, & Smith, 2016; Loschky, Hutson, Magliano, Larson, & Smith, 2014; Magliano, Larson, Higgs, & Loschky, 2016).
Although hardly any previous research has addressed this question directly (but see Lahnakoski et al., 2014; Loschky, Larson, Magliano, & Smith, 2015), two well-developed lines of research are highly relevant: research on eye movements and reading comprehension and research on eye movements in static and dynamic scenes.
The lack of a top-down effect on eye movements despite large comprehension differences was termed the "Tyranny of Film".
Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders' predictive behaviors, as revealed by their anticipatory eye movements during language comprehension.
Despite the ambiguity of what drives the Tyranny of Film, the relative dissociation between eye movements and narrative comprehension is very surprising in Touch of Evil, especially given the strength and consistency of the differences in comprehension between the groups.
