Art and film are everywhere. But how does the brain really perceive art and cinema? Prof. James Cutting, psychology, has been working on this question for over two decades. His research in perception ranges from optics to depth perception to cinema.

After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University, Cutting began studying speech perception and language. He was editor in chief of the prestigious Psychological Science magazine and has been teaching at Cornell since 1980.

In a recent study, he examined 150 films that spanned a period of 70 years, from 1935 to 2005. His results showed that the number of cuts in a typical movie has increased over time. Cutting was curious about why the human mind does not reject cuts in film, which are sudden changes across shots. “Evolutionarily, it’s remarkable that we make sense of them,” he said.

Cutting’s research also suggests that filmmakers try to match their movie cuts to their viewers’ biological abilities. Some commentators speculate that shorter shots in movies are due to the shrinking attention spans of modern-day Americans. Other research has suggested that multi-tasking has made modern people less likely to focus on one thing for a long period of time.

However, just like films today, silent movies had shots that were only five seconds long. This does not automatically indicate that people in the ’20s had short attention spans, Cutting countered. Part of his current research involves how “Hollywood style” movies seem to cater specifically to the rhythms of our attention.

In his paper Perceiving Scenes in Film and in the World, Cutting noted how the concept of occlusion is important to our viewing of cinema, just as it is in the real world. An occlusion is a visual cue that helps the brain conceptualize the distance of other viewed objects.

“As an artistic means of conveying depth information, partial occlusion has been found in art since Paleolithic times,” Cutting said. “Thus, one can make reasonable claim that occlusion was the first source of information discovered and used to depict spatial relations in depth.” Because this is a basic concept that has been with us for millennia, movies use this cue and mesh with our normal, everyday perception of the world.

In the same paper, he discusses the well-established phenomena known as retinal disparity and convergence. Retinal disparity is a binocular cue. When an object is very close, we perceive different images with both eyes. With convergence, as an object nears us, we can feel the muscles in our eyes tightening, offering another cue as to how close the object is.

Cutting’s paper proposed that we have three types of “spaces” around us in our everyday life, as well as in cinema and in art: vista space, action space and personal space. Because movies are portrayed on a screen, we do not utilize our visual cues of retinal disparity and convergence. Psychologically, the viewer does not experience an intrusion on her personal space, even though she perceives onscreen action in their vista space. This enables the viewer to become “lost” in the world of the movie, helping him or her to focus on the movie instead of personal concerns.

In the ’90s, Cutting experienced a personal loss: “My first wife died of multiple sclerosis and left me with my daughters, aged 10 and 14. It was a terrible time. While caring for my children, I found I also had to get out of the house.” Cutting spent more and more time in the Fine Arts Library, which was close to his home. He had been interested in French Impressionist paintings and started studying almost 1,000 books on these paintings.

He counted images, catalogued them and conducted what would later become one of his favorite experiments. While teaching Perception, his class for undergraduates, he tested the “mere exposure effect” on his students. This phenomenon suggests that the more times one is exposed to something, the more it tends to prefer that thing over unfamiliar things.

To test this theory, Cutting occasionally inserted a slide with French impressionist paintings into his Powerpoint presentations over the course of many lectures. At the end of one semester, he tested the students and observed that they preferred the more frequently displayed paintings to the more obscure ones. For next year’s class, however, he showed the better known paintings only once and the more obscure ones four times each. Interestingly, the students preferred the more obscure impressionist paintings. One theory about this result, Cutting explained, is that because the mind can process familiar images more quickly than new ones, it can misinterpret familiarity for fondness.

For Cutting, his passion for teaching fuels his passion for research: “Research comes out of teaching, not from some gap in endless information. You often don’t know when things will suddenly connect until you prepare a class, and that’s how you find what’s interesting to do research on.”