Coming Attractions: Moving images in psychology exhibits
by Michael Pearce
While planning the current Exploratorium exhibit development project, Attention, Emotion, and Judgment: How do minds figure out what to do?, we noticed that the use of film or video came up in a lot of our ideas for exhibits and programs. We called attention to this in our NSF proposal:
Film—documentary and fictional—is a powerful medium for showing the pattern, variety, and nuance of human behavior. It has also evolved a language for depicting and eliciting an extraordinary range of emotional states. We anticipate that film research will play a distinctive role in the development of the Mind exhibit area and in visitor evaluation. (Film will also be part of programming and dissemination.)
Our expectations have been confirmed. We’ve used video in exhibit prototypes, and have a mini-theater area in the Mind exhibit space where we show video clips that enrich and elaborate on the ideas in nearby exhibits. The museum’s film program regularly features films that address—directly and tangentially—the psychology and neuroscience of the project.
Current uses
Here are a few of the ways we’ve been using moving images in our Mind prototype area:
Animal behavior
Artist Sam Easterson mounts cameras on animals’ heads and backs and makes some very compelling videos from the footage. We present these videos as a window into the world of the animal, a rough portrayal of what the animal attends to. It is admittedly an incomplete and not fully accurate picture of what the animal sees—animals in the footage we show have visual systems that can differ a great deal from ours with regard to resolution, color perception, and so on. Yet presenting the animal’s point of view gives visitors an immediate, visceral sense of what it’s like to move through a particular animal’s world.
Social behavior
Allen Funt, the creator of the television show Candid Camera, has been called one of the great natural social psychologists of his time. Funt presented unsuspecting people with problems, and then recorded how they grappled with them. One of three children is given an ice cream cone, and has to decide whether to share it with his friends. People are confronted with strange behavior in an elevator and respond in surprising yet consistent ways.
Documentary film, including some of the funny and revealing Candid Camera footage, is a great tool for showing the nuances and complexity of social interactions. In our project we’ve found video/film particularly apt for showing how people go about making judgments and decisions.
Context and richness
On the surface, an exhibit about the mind can look pretty dull and inconsequential. After all, while it may, like any science exhibit, be about a fascinating natural phenomenon, it is in some sense invisible: you can’t see thoughts or emotions.
Among our exhibits about human attention, we have one that simply asks you to try to move your hand in one way while you’re moving your foot in another. It’s very hard to do. It’s also quite fun to attempt. (Try it: support yourself so that you can stand on one foot and hold the other foot in the air. Now begin making a circular motion with your foot. Continue moving your foot in circles while you make a figure 8 with your hand. Surprisingly difficult, isn’t it?) If you can talk somebody into trying it, they usually find it to be both confounding and amusing.
Trouble is, a simple graphic showing people what to do wasn’t convincing many people to try the exercise. So we went and found some footage of people doing very different things with their feet and hands: juggling torches while dancing, playing guitar and spinning a hula hoop, juggling balls while riding a unicycle, and so on. We show this video material on a small screen at the exhibit, and then ask them to try the hand-foot activity. (The screen is in fact quiet small, so that it doesn’t grab the spotlight from the hands-on exhibit itself.) The idea is that the video clips will not only draw people to the exhibit and get them to try the exercise, but will also help them consider how extraordinary the very narrow bottleneck of our attention is, and maybe even ponder why that is.
Cultural comparison
Much of the data of experimental psychology comes from using American and European college students as subjects. How do we distinguish between behaviors that appear everywhere from those that are culturally specific? Ideally, the research needs to be repeated in several cultures. But video that compares two or more cultures can certainly provide a glimpse of similarities and differences among peoples. And it can provoke questions about which of our practices and experiences are most deeply and universally human.
We mounted a temporary exhibition of photographs Paul Ekman took of the Fore people of southeast New Guinea. These were taken in the context of research he did that provided strong evidence that some expressions of emotion are common to all humans. Ekman also took film footage in New Guinea, which gives a fuller and more immediate picture of the Fore—their interactions with each other as well as with the outsiders.
Other possibilities
There are several uses of video that seem promising, but that so far haven’t led to viable prototypes.
Expression of emotion
We’ve developed several exhibits based on the research of Ekman and others about people’s ability to identify emotional expressions in faces. Most of this research has been done with still photographs. But in real human encounters, emotional expressions happen sequentially, and sometimes rather quickly. There is more verisimilitude in a video of an emotion than in a photo. We are experimenting with showing clips from movies of people expressing very powerful emotions.
Telling a lie entails, for most people, emotional stress that can sometimes be observed in their face, voice, or manner. We obtained footage of two former American presidents (one from each of the major political parties) telling lies and telling the truth, with the idea that visitors could look at them without the sound and try to determine which clips showed the subject lying. For various reason this never made it past the early prototype stage.
Evoking emotions
In developing exhibits about emotion, one thing we’ve wanted to do is to evoke particular emotions in visitors. There are a number of reasons for doing this. By keeping track of heart rate, breathing, or sweating, people can actually measure their physiological changes as they go through emotions. They can also simply observe certain things about themselves in different emotional states: How does it feel? Can a “negative” emotion—sadness or anger, for instance—sometimes feel pleasurable? A third possibility is to do some task in the emotional state and compare it to other emotional states or non-emotional states: Does your memory function differently when you’re frightened? Do your decision-making or problem-solving abilities change according to what sort of emotional state you’re in?
Referring to the research of James Gross of Stanford University and others, we developed a list of video clips that elicit some basic emotions: fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, amusement. But, at least so far, this idea hasn’t yielded viable exhibit prototypes.
Consequences of neurological damage
One way to see the connections between brain structure and people’s thought and behavior is by observing patients with neurological damage. The drawbacks of showing video footage of neuro patients are that it can be disturbing to watch, and that there can be privacy issues. For these reasons and others, our early attempts to get hold of footage of neuro patients from research labs weren’t very successful.
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