Symposium

Visual Perception and the Moving Image
Mixed-Methods Research for Cognitive Media Studies
MEHUL BHATT \ Inge Hinterwaldner
University of Bremen \ Humboldt University Berlin

This symposium brings together interdisciplinary scientific perspectives advocating mixed-methods research in the domain of cognitive media studies encompassing a range of (digital) narrative forms, e.g., feature film & TV, animation, immersive and virtual reality, new media in journalism.

Interdisciplinary mixed-methods research in this domain is particularly timely not only because of recent expansions in media technology, but also because of theoretical developments in the cognitive sciences and in machine vision and artificial intelligence. In the former domain, theories of visual attention and event perception are making contact with moving image studies to produce new explanations both for view integration in media and for naturalistic event perception and memory. In the latter domain, large-scale computational analyses of video data have successfully extracted key markers of event dynamics, spatial layout, and object identity to support a rich automated analysis that can provide an objective basis not only for cognitive science research, but also for applications in scene coding and event detection, media critique etc.

The symposium includes a panel of invited talks each covering one or more of the areas of focus. The symposium talks and its planned discussion points will focus on the role of basic research in cognitive studies of the moving image, and the interdisciplinary mixed-methods research opportunities that open up in the particular context of cognitive moving image studies.

(Complete details and final announcement about the venue will be available in due course.)