James E Cutting
Biographic Data
| ID | 751971 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James E Cutting |
| GIVEN NAMES | James E |
| FAMILY NAME | Cutting |
| SIGNATURE | CUTTING J E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7338-846X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Précis of Movies on Our Minds
Movies on Our Minds (Cutting, 2021) provides structural analyses of popular, English-language cinema and maps them onto biological and psychological bases. It progresses from the details of optics and screen projection; through transitions and shots; on to scenes, montages, and syntagmas; and finally to larger narrative units and the flow of patterns of elements across whole movies. It focuses on changes in all of those patterns across a century,…
Replies to Commentators on Movies on Our Minds
What a pleasure it is to have colleagues read Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement , to understand it, and to offer some praise and a panoply of diverse and penetrating criticisms. The perspectives and qualms raised in the four commentaries in the special section of this issue are well-worth considering in detail. My first reply concerns relations between cinematic narration and narrative, the second explores constraints on …
On the physical variables filmmakers use to engage viewers
Evolution of the Depiction of Telephone Calls in Popular Movies
Since Aristotle, tradition has it that stories are defined as unified wholes, divisible into smaller inter-related parts. In many narrative forms these parts are called scenes. Scenes, too, are regarded as wholes, typically unified on three grounds: a constancy of characters and location within a continuous time frame. Generally, if a storyteller changes one or more of these, the story has moved on to the next scene. But this rule is not universa…
Goldilocks Aesthetics
Much of aesthetics is based in psychological responses. Yet seldom have such responses—couched in empirically based psychological terms—played a central role in the discussion of movie aesthetics. Happily, Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema does just that. This commentary discusses some history and some twists and turns behind Berliner’s analysis
Mere Exposure and Aesthetic Realism
Where does the quality of an artwork reside? Is it in the work or in the perceiver and her culture? Belief in the former can be called aesthetic realism, the latter aesthetic antirealism. Nanay suggests that Cutting is an antirealist because he has found that multiple brief exposures to an artwork enhance viewers’ judgments of it. In fact, Cutting is agnostic on the distinction, but as a scientist is unable to discern how quality might be objecti…
Ulric Neisser (1928–2012)
Presents an obituary for Ulric Neisser. Neisser changed the course of psychology. He moved a generation of psychologists in the direction of the field named by his first book, Cognitive Psychology (1967, Appleton-Century-Crofts). He then challenged that field with his later book Cognition and Reality (1976, W. H. Freeman). Finally, he explored cracks in the received wisdom within the fields of attention, memory, and intelligence through a disting…
Representing Motion in a Static Image
Representing motion in a picture is a challenge to artists, scientists, and all other imagemakers. Moreover, it presents a problem that will not go away with electronic and digital media, because often the pedagogical purpose of the representation of motion is more important than the motion itself. All satisfactory solutions evoke motion-for example, dynamic balance (or broken symmetry), stroboscopic sequences, affine shear (or forward lean), and…
Four Ways to Reject Directed Perception
Burton and Turvey (1990) found that two invariants, the first and second moments of mass distribution, were available and used for the perception of the length of a hand-held rod. The first predominated in holding and the second in wielding. They denied, however, that these invariants were information. Thus, they deny directed perception (Cutting, 1986), which allows for multiple specifi- cation of objects/events, in favor of direct perception, w…
Perception with an eye for motion
The Role of Speech in Language
The Role of Speech in Language
Orienting Tasks Affect Recall Performance More Than Subjective Impressions of Ability to Recall
The type of task performed when 354 undergraduates listened to a list of words significantly affected their ability to recall that list. Subjective impressions of ability to recall, however, did not correspond to the number of items which could be recalled. Awareness lagged behind amount of incidental learning
The perception of stop-liquid clusters in phonological fusion
Representing Motion in a Static Image
Representing motion in a picture is a challenge to artists, scientists, and all other imagemakers. Moreover, it presents a problem that will not go away with electronic and digital media, because often the pedagogical purpose of the representation of motion is more important than the motion itself. All satisfactory solutions evoke motion-for example, dynamic balance (or broken symmetry), stroboscopic sequences, affine shear (or forward lean), and…
The perception of stop-liquid clusters in phonological fusion
Orienting Tasks Affect Recall Performance More Than Subjective Impressions of Ability to Recall
The type of task performed when 354 undergraduates listened to a list of words significantly affected their ability to recall that list. Subjective impressions of ability to recall, however, did not correspond to the number of items which could be recalled. Awareness lagged behind amount of incidental learning
The perception of stop-liquid clusters in phonological fusion
The Role of Speech in Language
The Role of Speech in Language
Perception with an eye for motion
Four Ways to Reject Directed Perception
Burton and Turvey (1990) found that two invariants, the first and second moments of mass distribution, were available and used for the perception of the length of a hand-held rod. The first predominated in holding and the second in wielding. They denied, however, that these invariants were information. Thus, they deny directed perception (Cutting, 1986), which allows for multiple specifi- cation of objects/events, in favor of direct perception, w…
Representing Motion in a Static Image
Representing motion in a picture is a challenge to artists, scientists, and all other imagemakers. Moreover, it presents a problem that will not go away with electronic and digital media, because often the pedagogical purpose of the representation of motion is more important than the motion itself. All satisfactory solutions evoke motion-for example, dynamic balance (or broken symmetry), stroboscopic sequences, affine shear (or forward lean), and…
Ulric Neisser (1928–2012)
Presents an obituary for Ulric Neisser. Neisser changed the course of psychology. He moved a generation of psychologists in the direction of the field named by his first book, Cognitive Psychology (1967, Appleton-Century-Crofts). He then challenged that field with his later book Cognition and Reality (1976, W. H. Freeman). Finally, he explored cracks in the received wisdom within the fields of attention, memory, and intelligence through a disting…
Mere Exposure and Aesthetic Realism
Where does the quality of an artwork reside? Is it in the work or in the perceiver and her culture? Belief in the former can be called aesthetic realism, the latter aesthetic antirealism. Nanay suggests that Cutting is an antirealist because he has found that multiple brief exposures to an artwork enhance viewers’ judgments of it. In fact, Cutting is agnostic on the distinction, but as a scientist is unable to discern how quality might be objecti…
Goldilocks Aesthetics
Much of aesthetics is based in psychological responses. Yet seldom have such responses—couched in empirically based psychological terms—played a central role in the discussion of movie aesthetics. Happily, Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema does just that. This commentary discusses some history and some twists and turns behind Berliner’s analysis
Evolution of the Depiction of Telephone Calls in Popular Movies
Since Aristotle, tradition has it that stories are defined as unified wholes, divisible into smaller inter-related parts. In many narrative forms these parts are called scenes. Scenes, too, are regarded as wholes, typically unified on three grounds: a constancy of characters and location within a continuous time frame. Generally, if a storyteller changes one or more of these, the story has moved on to the next scene. But this rule is not universa…
Précis of Movies on Our Minds
Movies on Our Minds (Cutting, 2021) provides structural analyses of popular, English-language cinema and maps them onto biological and psychological bases. It progresses from the details of optics and screen projection; through transitions and shots; on to scenes, montages, and syntagmas; and finally to larger narrative units and the flow of patterns of elements across whole movies. It focuses on changes in all of those patterns across a century,…
Replies to Commentators on Movies on Our Minds
What a pleasure it is to have colleagues read Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement , to understand it, and to offer some praise and a panoply of diverse and penetrating criticisms. The perspectives and qualms raised in the four commentaries in the special section of this issue are well-worth considering in detail. My first reply concerns relations between cinematic narration and narrative, the second explores constraints on …
On the physical variables filmmakers use to engage viewers
Psychology (10 works) · Art (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Movie theater (4 works) · Cognitive psychology (3 works) · Literature (3 works)