Movie Stimuli (NAT Paradigm)

Short films (~4 minutes each) shown during naturalistic encoding sessions (ses-19 through ses-28). The movie schedule is defined in movies/MMM movies - Sheet1.csv.

  • Count: ~40 unique titles across 10 sessions
  • Duration: ~4 minutes each
  • Styles: Animated, live-action, and stop-motion; with or without speech
  • Source: Mix of short films and clips from longer films (sourced via a “memory search project” with collaborators Jordan & Kahlyn). Movie files are stored on Google Drive (links in short films 4 minutes.rtf).
  • Movie files: 60 .mov files in movies/movie_files/, named {Title}_trimmed_normalized_filtered.mov
  • Movie cues: 60 .jpg recall cue images in movies/movie_cues/, named {Title}_cue.jpg (see Movie Cue Images below)

Movie Cue Images

During free recall, participants are prompted with a movie title. If they cannot recall which movie the title refers to, they are shown a cue image — a single representative frame from the film. The cue is designed to orient the participant without biasing their memory of the movie’s content.

  • Count: 60 images (one per movie)
  • Format: JPG
  • Location: movies/movie_cues/{Title}_cue.jpg

Recall Conditions

Each movie in a session is assigned one of three recall conditions:

Condition Label Description
1 Same-session recall Viewed and recalled within the same session
2 Next-session recall Viewed this session, recalled in the following session
3 Multiple-repeat Recurring film shown across many/all sessions

Two films recur across all 10 sessions as condition 3: “From Dad To Son” (animated, no speech) and “The Bench” (live-action, speech).

Session Structure

Each session contains 6–8 movies:

  • ~4 condition 1 movies (same-session recall)
  • ~2 condition 2 movies (recalled next session)
  • 2 condition 3 movies (recurring)
  • Sessions 2–10 also include 2 carry-over movies from the prior session (positions 7–8 at recall) that are recalled but not re-viewed

Movie Schedule Metadata

MMM movies - Sheet1.csv columns:

Column Description
Session NAT session number (1–10, mapping to ses-19 through ses-28)
Condition Recall condition: 1 = same-session, 2 = next-session, 3 = multi-repeat
Movie name Title of the film
Movie style Style description (e.g., “Animated, no speech”, “Live-action, speech”)
Movie duration Duration (currently empty — all ~4 minutes)
Cue position at Recall Order position (1–8) of this movie’s recall cue; N/A for condition-2 movies

Blank rows in the CSV separate sessions. Rows without a condition value are carry-over movies from the prior session.

Computational Features (viz2psy)

Movie frames and cue images are processed with viz2psy, producing per-movie temporal feature timeseries in movies/viz2psy_scores/.

For each movie, the output includes:

  • {Title}_scores.csv — one row per sampled frame, indexed by time (seconds), with ~2,900 feature columns (memorability, emotion, CLIP embeddings, etc.)
  • {Title}_scores.meta.json — feature definitions and provenance
  • {Title}_scores_dashboard.html — interactive visualization of features over time
  • {Title}_scores_frames/ — extracted frame images (JPG)

Cue images are scored separately in a consolidated cue output file.

See the viz2psy documentation for full feature definitions.