Why You Rarely Notice Major Movie Bloopers

Pacific Standard:

Even the most practiced auteurs make embarrassing continuity errors. Take, for instance, Garry Marshall’s otherwise flawless 1990 romantic classic Pretty Woman. In one scene, a croissant makes a radical transformation into a pancake. And then, miraculously, a bite mark in one shot evaporates from the next.

The reason these mistakes so often go unnoticed by everyone except next-level blooper detectives may have something to do with the way people process the visual field.

A new study in Nature Neuroscience by MIT postdoctoral fellow Jason Fischer and his University of California-Berkeley colleague David Whitney suggests that humans are equipped with “serially dependent” visual perception, a process that uses prior stimuli and current information to construct the scene in front of us.

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