Sponsored by the PNP program

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Film
A Workshop at Washington University

Everyday events are complex, dynamic, and fleeting. So too is film. How does the nervous system extract meaning from real or filmed events? Film theory, particularly that which is empirically oriented, has a lot to say to psychologists and neuroscientists about this problem. At the same time, recent research in cognitive neuroscience has implications for how the mind understands film. The goal of this workshop is to bring together recent research on perceptual psychology and neuroscience with developments in film and media theory to draw conclusions about how people understand real and mediated events.
 
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Dates and Location
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Day Time
Speaker
Title (with links to abstracts, auxiliary materials)
 

Friday
April 22

   
1:30 pm Jeff Zacks Welcome
2:00 pm
Murray Smith (U. Kent)
Against Nature; or, Confessions of a Darwinian Modernist
  The Sixth Sense of a Spectator
4:00 pm break  
4:30 pm
Mark Rollins (Washington U.)
Film as Art: Intentions and the Interpretation of Cinema
 
Saturday
April 23
        
8:15 am breakfast  
9:00 am
Jeff Smith (Washington U.)
A Film Scholar's Perspective on the Visual Perception of Short Duration Input
10:00 am
Dan Levin (Vanderbilt U.)
Intentional Vision at the Movies
11:00 am break  
11:30 am Tim Shipley (Temple U.) Action Perception and Representation: The Roles of Paths and Dynamics
12:30 pm lunch  
2:30 pm Inter-subject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Movie Watching
3:15 pm
Emily Grossman (UC Irvine)
Biological motion: The neural basis of how we see people move
4:00 pm Tatiana Sitnikova (Mass. Gen.) Film Comprehension: The Human Brain Mechanisms for Using Real-World Knowledge
 
Sunday
April 24
   
8:30 am breakfast  
9:30 am
Jeff Zacks (Washington U.)
Perceptual and Neural Segmentation of Film
10:30 am Human Prefrontal Cortex Codes Event Knowledge
11:30 am snack, adjourn  
Questions? Contact Kimberly Mount or Jeff Zacks.