James E. Cutting

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James Eric Cutting is an American cognitive scientist and a professor emeritus of psychology at Cornell University. He is known for studying how people perceive the world, including how films and their storytelling have changed over time. He has also researched the mere exposure effect, navigation and wayfinding, and biological motion, as well as various aspects of perception and art.

Education and career
Cutting earned a BA in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969 and a PhD in psychology from Yale University in 1973. He taught at Yale and Wesleyan University before joining Cornell in 1980 as an associate professor. He spent time at Stanford University as a visiting scholar (1977–78) and at the Atari Sunnyvale Research Laboratory as a visiting scientist (1983–84). While at Cornell, he also conducted visiting work at the University of Arizona, the University of Padova, the CNRS in Paris, and the University of Trieste. He served as editor of the journal Psychological Science from 2003 to 2007 and was the editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance from 1987 to 1993. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 1993.

In 1995, he wrote a chapter on perceiving layout and distances for the book Perception of Space and Motion. He was named the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology in 2013, chaired the Cornell Psychology Department from 2011 to 2016, and retired in 2020. He is a charter fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists (which he chaired in 2003–2004).

Research highlights
Early in his career, Cutting focused on speech perception and co-edited a 1975 book on the role of speech in language. In the late 1970s, he began studying biological motion and later expanded to other visual-perception topics such as shapes, depth, and motion. He published a number of works on these topics, including the 1986 book Perception with an Eye for Motion.

From the 1990s onward, his main focus has been visual perception. He also spent time at Cornell’s Fine Arts Library studying French Impressionist paintings, collecting and cataloguing images to study the mere exposure effect. In a series of experiments, he showed paintings more or less often to students and found that repeated exposure influenced their preferences. He argued that repeated presentation of images helps form art canons, a view he explored further in his 2006 book Impressionism and Its Canon.

Movies and the mind
After editing Psychological Science, Cutting turned his attention to how Hollywood movies have evolved over the last century. With his graduate students, he analyzed about 300 English-language movies from 1915 to 2015. They found that modern films tend to have more motion, shorter shot durations and scenes, fewer dissolves, more closeups, fewer characters per frame, less clutter, more parallel action, and higher contrast. These changes help hold viewers’ attention and align with patterns of human attention often described as pink noise.

In 2018, Cutting and colleagues showed that filmmakers have tuned shot duration, motion, sound, and scene length to better match fluctuations in people’s attention. He continued his work on how visual clutter affects recognizing actors’ emotions. His book Movies on Our Minds was published in 2021.