The Effect of Media Professionalization on Cognitive Neurodynamics During Audiovisual Cuts

Abstract

Experts apply their experience to the proper development of their routine activities. Their acquired expertise or professionalization is expected to help in the development of those recurring tasks. Media professionals spend their daily work watching narrative contents on screens, so learning how they manage visual perception of those contents could be of interest in an increasingly audiovisual society. Media works require not only the understanding of the storytelling, but also the decoding of the formal rules and presentations. We recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from 36 participants (18 media professionals and 18 non-media professionals) while they were watching audiovisual contents, and compared their eyeblink rate and their brain activity and connectivity. We found that media professionals decreased their blink rate after the cuts, suggesting that they can better manage the loss of visual information that blinks entail by sparing them when new visual information is being presented. Cuts triggered similar activation of basic brain processing in the visual cortex of the two groups, but different processing in medial and frontal cortical areas, where media professionals showed a lower activity. Effective brain connectivity occurred in a more organized way in media professionals-possibly due to a better communication between cortical areas that are coordinated for decoding new visual content after cuts.

Keywords: connectivity; expertise; film cuts; neurocinematics; professionalization; visual perception.

Figure 1

SBRs in non-media (red) and media (turquoise) professionals, during the first second after a cut and during the rest of video stimuli without cuts.

Figure 2

Scalp map after the cuts of the three analyzed time windows (400–600, 600–800, and 800–100 ms) of media and non-media professionals.

Figure 3

ERSPs in non-media (left) and media (middle) professionals, in electrode C3. The right image shows in pink the statistically significant differences between the two groups (unpaired t-test with no correction method for multiple comparison, p < 0.05).

Figure 4

PLVs in non-media (turquoise) and media (red) professionals in different spectral bands: theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–12 Hz), low beta (12–20 Hz), high beta (20–28 Hz), and low gamma (28–40 Hz).

Figure 5

Granger causality in non-media (left) and media (middle) professionals, after the cut (0–1,000 ms, with a baseline of −500 ms before the cut), with significance level based on 100 surrogates. On the right, in pink, the statistically significant differences between the two groups (t-test, p < 0.05). Those results correspond to the higher GC indices in media professionals compared with the non-media group. No higher GC indices in non-media professionals were found.