Comics and cognitive systems: The processing of visual narratives

Humans have drawn sequential images as a means of expression throughout history, from cave paintings and frescoes to wall-carvings and tapestries (McCloud, 1993). In contemporary society, we find them most prevalently in comics of the world, and over the past two decades, increasing attention has turned to this communicative system in the cognitive sciences. Earlier work often focused on theory alone, drawing from paradigms in linguistics or semiotics (for review, see Cohn, 2012; Wildfeuer & Bateman, 2016) or from theorists outside academia (e.g., McCloud, 1993). However, newer studies test theoretical predictions with empirical corpus analyses and both behavioral and neurocognitive experimentation. As in language research, combining these methodologies provides converging evidence on the structure of visual narratives, their diversity across the world, and their comprehension by minds and brains. Recent research has especially focused on the overlapping cognition between the processing of the “visual languages” constituting drawn visual narratives and the linguistic systems of verbal and signed languages (Cohn, 2013; Magliano, Larson, Higgs, & Loschky, 2015). These presentations further such analyses, and explore questions related to the degree to which these visual languages share mechanisms with linguistic and other cognitive systems.