Over the last decade, television screens and display monitors have increased in
size considerably, but has this improved our televisual experience? Our working
hypothesis was that the audiences adopt a general strategy that “bigger is
better.” However, as our visual perceptions do not tap directly into basic
retinal image properties such as retinal image size (C. A. Burbeck,
1987), we wondered whether object size itself might
be an important factor. To test this, we needed a task that would tap into the
subjective experiences of participants watching a movie on different-sized
displays with the same retinal subtense. Our participants used a line bisection
task to self-report their level of “presence” (i.e., their involvement with the
movie) at several target locations that were probed in a 45-min section of the
movie “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Measures of pupil
dilation and reaction time to the probes were also obtained. In Experiment 1, we
found that subjective ratings of presence increased with physical screen size,
supporting our hypothesis. Face scenes also produced higher presence scores than
landscape scenes for both screen sizes. In Experiment 2, reaction time and pupil
dilation results showed the same trends as the presence ratings and pupil
dilation correlated with presence ratings, providing some validation of the
method. Overall, the results suggest that real-time measures of subjective
presence might be a valuable tool for measuring audience experience for
different types of (i) display and (ii) audiovisual material.
