In many films, story is presented in an order different from chronological. Deviations from the chronological order in a narrative are called anachronies. Narratological theory and the evidence from psychological experiments indicate that anachronies allow stories to be more interesting, as the non-chronological order evokes curiosity in viewers. In this paper we investigate the historical dynamics in the use of anachronies in film. Particularly, we follow the cultural attraction theory that suggests that, given certain conditions, cultural evolution should conform to our cognitive preferences. We study this on a corpus of 80 most popular mystery films released in 1970–2009. We observe that anachronies have become used more frequently, and in a greater proportion of films. We also find that films that made substantial use of anachronies, on average, distributed the anachronies evenly along film length, while the films that made little use of anachronies placed them near the beginning and end. We argue that this can reflect a functional difference between these two types of using anachronies. The paper adds further support to the argument that popular culture may be influenced to a significant degree by our cognitive biases.

在许多电影中，故事的呈现顺序与时间顺序不同。叙述中与时间顺序的偏差称为过时。叙事学理论和来自心理实验的证据表明，不合时宜的故事使故事更有趣，因为非按时间顺序排列的顺序引起了观众的好奇心。在本文中，我们调查了电影中使用过时的历史动态。特别地，我们遵循文化吸引力理论，该理论认为，在一定条件下，文化进化应符合我们的认知偏好。我们以1970-2009年发行的80部最受欢迎的神秘电影的语料库为研究对象。我们观察到过时的情况已经越来越普遍，并且在电影中所占的比例也更高。我们还发现，大量使用过时的电影，平均而言，将过时电影沿影片的长度均匀分布，而很少使用过时电影的影片则将其放置在开头和结尾的附近。我们认为这可以反映这两种使用过时的功能差异。本文进一步支持了流行文化可能会受到我们的认知偏见影响的论点。