Cutting

What holds our attention as moviegoers? Sparkling dialog? Ravishing visuals? Carnage?

None of the above.

It is the transitions between the shots -- the cuts -- that force us to pay attention. As film editors put shots together, they have come to mimic the same pattern that controls our attention, independent of shot length, reports James Cutting, Cornell professor of psychology, whose new co-authored study is published in the March issue of the online journal Psychological Science.

Cutting reports that most films tend to follow this same pattern -- a recurring pattern called 1/f that also is found in the pulsing of pulsars, human heartbeats, tides and even certain segments of stock market activity.

"Our brains generate this 1/f pattern," said Cutting. "What we found is that the shot structure in movies seems to have evolved over the last 50 years or so to come closer to it."

The film closest to a perfect 1/f profile? "Back to the Future" from 1985. Early Hitchcock films scored high. The "Star Wars" movies also conformed to the pattern.

Cutting and two students examined 150 of the most popular films made between 1935 and 2005 across all genres. They looked at every single cut in each of the films. While that stage of the work was done by a computer program, it took 12-30 hours to analyze each film and 15 months to complete the study.

Whereas shots in silent films were about five seconds long, then up to 10 seconds in the early sound era, they have declined since, and now average about four seconds.

"Films have gotten faster, there's no question," Cutting said. "What's new here is not just the average shot duration but the pattern of the shots as they are revealed over time -- that is different over the last 50 years or so."

Cutting compiled the length of all the shots into a vector -- a string of numbers -- and performed Fourier analysis that decomposes the string into sine waves. Those waves revealed a structure of many different-sized, simultaneously present, oscillating waves.

"We have waves in our attention that course through us in periods of tens of minutes," Cutting said. "Other waves that are in the domain of minutes. Still others last tens of seconds. And they're all there at the same time."

This 1/f pattern harnesses our attention and recurs throughout nature. He theorizes that when film editors see one another's work, "they pass it on by something like cultural transmission."

Explained Cutting, "The result has to do with how we allocate our attention up to a couple of hours or more, and how the attention vacillates over that time. It's about attention over minutes and hours and the patterns that fall within that. I think film editors are controlling this particular pattern, which mimics these waves that each one of us have. Statistically, when you look at all of those waves together, they have the same kind of pattern."

Regardless of what patterns emerge, a film that closely approximates the 1/f pattern may still be quite awful, Cutting said. "This pattern has no relationship to how much people liked the films as measured by the Internet Movie Database. Our result is not about goodness of films, but about the possibility of these films harnessing our attention as we watch them. I cannot vouch for quality."