Topics for Theses
Our professorship awards Bachelor's and Master's theses on various topics in the field of applied cognitive research. If you are interested, please get in touch with the relevant contact person.
Please note that the topics listed below are only a selection. For further topics, please contact our employees directly! You can find completed theses here.
Attentional Shifts in Film Viewing: Ambient and Focal Visual Processing
Analyzing the time course of eye movements during free exploration of real-world scenes often reveals a systematic increase in fixation durations and a decrease in saccade amplitudes, which is explained as a shift from ambient (bottom-up spatial orientation) to focal (top-down object-related) visual processing. Previous studies suggest that the ambient-to-focal strategy responds to environmental changes, such as the onset of various visual stimuli and scene cuts in dynamic contexts, thereby enhancing the encoding of visual information.
In everyday life, we perceive the world as a seamless flow of linked images. However, Hollywood-style films create the impression of a continuous narrative by presenting discontinuous visual information in a way that is easy to comprehend, requires no specific cognitive skills, and may even be understood by viewers without prior film experience. During film viewing, each frame displaces the previous one. In a continuous shot, the spatial and temporal displacement from frame to frame is small enough for the viewer to see it as motion within the same context rather than as different contexts. On the other hand, when the visual displacement is significant (e.g., the abrupt onset of the new visual environment caused by a cut), viewers are forced to re-evaluate the new image as a different context.
This raises an important question: How do films maintain the expectation of narrative continuity during spatiotemporally discontinuous motion? Does the ambient-to-focal strategy play a role in film viewing, facilitating the re-evaluation of new images (visual displacement at the moment of the cut) as different contexts, thereby advancing our comprehension of the current film narrative?
This master’s thesis utilizes eye-tracking technology combined with a film-quiz experiment to investigate how the human visual system is sensitive to varying degrees of discontinuity and employs certain visual processing strategies to manage these visual changes. Programming skills are advantageous, as is an interest in working with data. Details and requirements will be further discussed if interested.