AI-generated content has grown significantly in recent years. Today, AI-generated and human-made images coexist across various settings, including news media, social platforms, and beyond. However, we still know relatively little about how audiences interpret and evaluate these different types of images. The goal of this study was to examine whether image interpretation is influenced by the origin of the image (AI-generated vs. human-made). Additionally, we aimed to explore whether visual professionalization influences how images are interpreted. To this end, we presented 24 AI-generated images (produced using Midjourney, DALL·E, and Firefly) and 8 human-made images to 161 participants—71 visual professionals and 90 non-professionals. Participants were asked to evaluate each image based on the following: (1) the source they believed the image originated from, (2) the level of realism, and (3) the level of credibility they attributed to it. A total of 5152 responses were collected for each question. Our results reveal that human-made images are more readily recognized as such, whereas AI-generated images are frequently misclassified as human-made. We also find that human-made images are perceived as both more realistic and more credible than AI-generated ones. We conclude that individuals are generally unable to accurately determine the source of an image, which in turn affects their assessment of its credibility.

Fake images of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in the communication of information at the beginning of the first Covid-19 pandemic

Eye blinks provoke a loss of visual information. However, we are not constantly making conscious decisions about the appropriate moment to blink. The presence or absence of eye blinks also denotes levels of attention. We presented three movies with the exact same narrative but different styles of editing and recorded participants’ eye blinks. We found that moments of increased or decreased eye blinks by viewers coincided with the same content in the different movie styles. The moments of increased eye blinks corresponded to those when the actor leaves the scene and when the movie repeats the same action for a while. The moments of decreased eye blinks corresponded to actions where visual information was crucial to proper understanding of the scene presented. According to these results, viewers’ attention is more related to narrative content than to the style of editing when watching movies.

Background: The recent COVID-19 pandemic has seen an explosion of coronavirus-related information. In many cases, this information was supported by images representing the SARS-CoV-2. Aim: To evaluate how attributes of images representing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that were used in the initial phase of the coronavirus crisis in 2020 influenced the public’s perceptions. Methods: We have carried out an in-depth survey using 46 coronavirus images, asking individuals how beautiful, scientific, realistic, infectious, scary and didactic they appeared to be. Results: We collected 91,908 responses, obtaining 15,315 associations for each category. While the reference image of SARS-CoV-2 used in the media is a three-dimensional, colour, illustration, we found that illustrations of the coronavirus were perceived as beautiful but not very realistic, scientific or didactic. By contrast, black and white coronavirus images are thought to be the opposite. The beauty of coronavirus images was negatively correlated with the perception of scientific realism and didactic value. Conclusion: Given these effects and the consequences on the individual’s perception, it is important to evaluate the influence that different images of SARS-CoV-2 may have on the population.

The purpose of this study is to determine if there is asymmetry in the brain activity between both hemispheres while watching cuts in movies. We presented videos with cuts to 36 participants, registered electrical brain activity through electroencephalography (EEG) and analyzed asymmetry in frontal, somatomotor, temporal, parietal and occipital areas. EEG power and alpha (8–13 Hz) asymmetry were analyzed based on 4032 epochs (112 epochs from videos × 36 participants) in each hemisphere. On average, we found negative asymmetry, indicating a greater alpha power in the left hemisphere and a greater activity in the right hemisphere in frontal, temporal and occipital areas. The opposite was found in somatomotor and temporal areas. However, with a high inter-subjects variability, these asymmetries did not seem to be significant. Our results suggest that cuts in audiovisuals do not provoke any specific asymmetrical brain activity in the alpha band in viewers. We conclude that brain asymmetry when decoding audiovisual content may be more related with narrative content than with formal style.

The goal of this work is to explain how the cuts and their insertion in different editing styles influence the attention of viewers. The starting hypothesis is that viewers’ response to cuts varies depending on whether they watch a movie with a classical versus a messy or chaotic editing style. To undertake this investigation, we created three videos with the same narrative content and duration but different editing styles. One video was a fixed one-shot movie. Another video followed a classical editing style, based on the rules of classic Hollywood movies, according to David Bordwell’s studies. The other video used a chaotic style, beyond post-classic, which broke the classical rules of continuity and was inspired by music video clips. We showed these stimuli to 40 subjects while recording their brain activity using the electroencephalography (EEG) technique. The results showed that cuts reduce the eyeblink frequency during the second after they are seen. Since blinking is a well-known attention marker, we propose that cuts increase viewers’ attention. Cuts initiate a flow of electrical activity from the visual cortex to the cognitive processing zone in the prefrontal area. We also found that the different editing styles in which cuts are inserted affected perception, confirming the initial hypothesis. These results could be of great interest and utility for creators of audiovisual content and the management of attention in their work.