Static and dynamic visual narratives, by brain and by eye

Narrative has been studied for millennia, though recent attention in the cognitive sciences has turned towards visual narratives like those found in comics (Cohn, 2013a) and films (Zacks, 2014). Most agree that the basic principles guiding comprehension involve principles that extend across the verbal and visual domains (Cohn, 2013b; Gernsbacher, 1990; Magliano & Zacks, 2011). However, visual units of narrative—both drawn and moving—demand different affordances to retrieve and integrate information. Unlike verbal information, the sequential units of visual narratives use an analog spatial representation, from which a comprehender must extract the relevant information, ignore or suppress the irrelevant information, and work to connect such information across a sequence of units. This involves the integration of complex event information and its interaction with narrative structures. Such a process is further varied in the difference between static, drawn visual narratives (as in comics) and dynamic, moving ones (as in films). The introduction of movement to a sequence provides important cues and an additional layer of constraints on the effective communication of visual sequential information. This symposium highlights this growing field within the cognitive sciences. First, the presentations focus on visual narratives of both types: static, drawn narratives, and dynamic, moving ones. Second, they split their focus between eye-tracking and cognitive neuroscience. Together, these presentations will highlight the relevance of visual narratives for studying many facets of cognition, including attention, events, narrative, and discourse. Do you see what I see? The curious absence of endogenous effects on gaze during cinematic narratives