Action Mismatches Across Movie Edits Minimally Impact Perceived Smoothness and Change Detection

When movie action sequences cut between different camera views of a single action, viewers have little trouble seeing a coherent, continuous event. They can do so even when parts of an action are missing or overlap by a few frames. It is not clear, however, whether this apparent flexibility is limited to ratings of smoothness or whether it extends to other forms of between-view integration, such as property tracking. Experiment 1a confirmed that people are flexible in perceiving action sequences as continuous in the face of mismatches: repeating or omitting up to 0.5 s of action had relatively little impact on perceptual smoothness ratings. Experiment 2a showed that action mismatches did not increase or decrease the detection of changes to the actor’s clothing, but we did observe lower perceived smoothness ratings when omitting than when repeating 0.5 s of action, especially for participants who missed the change. Experiment 2b replicated the lack of an effect of action matching on change detection but did not replicate the difference in smoothness ratings for repeating and omitting frames. Experiment 3 again observed lower smoothness ratings when participants detected a change, but the mere presence of an undetected change did not impact smoothness ratings. Overall, action mismatches had surprisingly little effect on perceived smoothness or change detection.