Little busy for a bit...

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to blog as much as I'd like these days, and the coming months are likely to be a little quiet around here. I'm hoping to have a few big announcements to make soon. However, I'm aiming to defend  my dissertation this semester (!), so blog posts are likely to stay sparse for awhile.

Eye movement in reading comics

I've posted a few studies that have looked at how people's eyes move across comic pages (here and here), and I recently found another. This short study looked at when people's eye movements skip panels or go back and re-read them. 

They found that people spend more time reading panels with text than with just images, and that panels without text are more likely to be skipped and to be read with peripheral vision. Unusual panel arrangements (i.e. non-horizontal then vertical arrangements) also possibly led to jumping over panels (as was found in another study as well). After skipping these panels, participants then backtrack and re-read them.

These findings are consistent with previous studies that compared the eye-movements of expert and non-expert comic readers. Non-experts tend to focus more on text and read more erratically throughout a page. Experts tend to read more smoothly and focus more on the images. 

General studies like this are interesting, though I'd really like to see more studies that specifically target specific issues. Are there particular features of page layouts that motivate skipping panels? Are there features of layouts that impede on the actual comprehension of panels? Once we get beyond these very basic sorts of "what do eyes do generally" studies, we can really start exploring how looking at eye-movements can tell us about the comprehension of comic pages.

Chiba, Shinichi , Takamasa Tanaka, Kenji Shoji, and Fubito Toyama. 2007. "Eye Movement in Reading Comics." In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Display Workshops, 1255-58 

Attention and comic panels

Craig Fischer has a nice article over at The Comics Journal about how panels focus attention, particularly focusing on the work of Jack Kirby. He nicely keys in on several techniques that authors (like Kirby) use to highlight certain aspects of a panel over others. For example, putting things in the foreground vs. background, thick lines vs. thin lines, or focusing on people vs. objects.

He then goes on to create an interesting taxonomy of ways that content connects with a narrative, and whether the focal and background elements are done in a common style. As a descriptive taxonomy, I think it works pretty well.

At the end of the piece, Fischer wishes there was more empirical work on how people read comics, especially with eye-trackers. Apparently he hasn't been reading this blog much! Amongst the many studies I've reviewed here about comprehending sequential images, there have been some eye-tracking research on comics that I review here and here.

Also, while my empirical work has mostly focused on how sequential images are comprehended, my theoretical work has looked at the capacity of panels to convey attention for many years. For example, I discuss it in this blog post, as well as in my article, A Visual Lexicon (pdf).

My approach to attention has focused less on the individual aspects of a panel's features, and more on how the panel as a whole acts as a "window" onto a scene. The panel then simulates the same type of "window" on the fictitious world that attention does in our visual perception. As I said in that blog post:

"Most of the time though, panels serve to exclude all relevant information except for the elements that need to be focused on, or at least clearly distinguish what is relevant from irrelevant. This lets panels provide a graphic manifestation of this mental "spotlight," allowing the author to control that attention instead of the reader's wandering eyes (which is one of the reasons I formally call panels "Attention Units")."

However, there's much that could be learned by studying the combination of the types of attention that Fischer talks about (those visible in a panel) and those that I talk about (how what is visible connects with what is not visible, or to other parts of a narrative).

Take my online comics experiment!

At long last, I have another comic experiment ready to go that needs your help, dear reader! This survey will help us prepare our next study looking at how the brain comprehends comics, and your help would be greatly appreciated. It should take roughly 15 minutes and involves reading comics and giving a basic rating for how much they make sense. Participation enters you in a raffle for a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy.

UPDATE: This survey is now closed. Thank you for your participation! If you would like to participate in future experiments, please email me.

A checklist for decent scholarship

I've read a ridiculous amount of research on the comprehension of sequential images the last few years. Many people have written papers about this topic, often from many different disciplines. While I can respect that not everyone will aim for the linguistic and psychological approach that I use (and nor should they if they have different intents), there are several pet peeves that I found repeated over and over that make me feel like just disregarding what people write.

So, here's a checklist for getting me to take your scholarship on comics seriously:

Get your names right. I once read a paper that was cited as an "authoritative" source by another book only to find it said the author of Calvin and Hobbes was "Bob Watterson" in a trivial throwaway line. I could maybe forgive a spelling error or something accidental, but not knowing that his name is actually Bill made me lose respect for the entire paper and regard the scholar as someone who was a "tourist" in this research.

Get your basic facts right. An otherwise decent article commented that Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library was "computer-generated." It's actually done by hand. Such a mistake could easily be remedied with a Google search. And, again, this was a trivial descriptor that was unnecessary for any part of the discussion.

Do your background research. Often I read papers where they only major work of scholarship about sequential image comprehension mentioned is McCloud's Understanding Comics. As important as it was for establishing this line of thought, it is not the only work out there. Or, if they want to talk about cognition, they'll cite a textbook written over 30 years ago. This just isn't acceptable. One of these days I'll write a huge paper reviewing all the theories and experiments that I've found that have ever looked at sequential images (and there are more than you'd think... I've been painfully remiss in updating my bibliography and I'll be the first to say that there's probably more out there that I haven't found yet). Until then, do your own research beyond a cursory job. The same goes for any topic of research or else you'll get a response like this.

Say something novel. It's amazing the amount of papers that I read that merely regurgitate McCloud's ideas of panel transitions and closure without adding anything new. At best, they often just reinterpret his same ideas and draw a connection between them and something in another line of thinking. But, they don't add anything to what he said. Almost ten years ago, I just about doubled the amount of transitions McCloud had before abandoning panel transitions altogether.  So, even if you're working with transitions, I know there's more to say than he did (and probably what I did too). Truly, if you can't say something new, why bother saying anything? (AND... why should anyone read or cite your paper??)

Seriously though... shouldn't all these things be part of basic research and paper writing? Why then are they so rampantly disregarded when talking about the structure of comics? For a long time, scholars of comics felt the need to justify such research. However, the best way to convince people to take this work seriously is to actually do serious scholarship. 

On tap...

Thank you to everyone who came out for my talk last week at the New York Comic Con! I had a great time giving the presentation, so I hope it was as enjoyable for all you in the audience.

I have a few blog posts planned for the coming weeks if I can find the time to finish them off. As usual, about a dozen projects are being worked on right now. Included among those is one that we will soon be launching an online experiment for. So, if you'd like to help with some comic research, watch this space over the next few weeks!

New York ComicCon 2011

Next Saturday on October 15th I'll be speaking at the New York ComicCon for the first time. Here's my blurb from the program:

4:00-5:30 Comics Studies Conference 6: Understanding Comics and the Self—Neil Cohn (Tufts University) discusses several psychology experiments measuring reaction time and brainwaves that contribute to our understanding of what goes on in the brain when a person reads a comic and reveals that the understanding of comics involves a complex negotiation between a hierarchic system of narrative and the construction of meaning. [...]

I'm quite excited about this talk because it looks like I'll be presenting brand new data from my latest study of comics and the brain. Hope to see you there!

Development of drawing abilities

The book Making Sense of Children's Drawings by John Willats puts forth a compelling theory of how kids learn to draw, and the course of that development.

To Willats, drawings link up to our mental conceptions of how things look in the world, thereby rejecting a view that says drawings are entirely based on what we see. A great example of this is when children are given dice and told to draw them. Instead of drawing them as they see them, they draw dice with all six sides, which would be impossible to see.

Willats also provides great detail on the origin of the "don't copy" trend of instruction in drawing (which he, like me, is highly critical of). As he describes, this came originally from the 1800s educator Franz Cižek, based on Romantic ideas that children had a pure "inner creativity" that needed to develop unspoiled by imitation from external influences.

As he nicely points out, this doctrine is largely not reflected by what children actually do. Indeed, closer inspection of Cižek's own students show a consistent group style. They were copying between each other, just not from him.

Also, his general trajectory for learning to draw runs like this:

• 1-3 yrs: dots, lines, regions. Scribbles denote whole regions of space, not necessarily just random uncontrolled lines.
• 2/3-8 yrs: Bounded areas depict regions and volumes. Round, long regions denote round long volumes, while long or round regions show flat volumes.
• ~6-10 yrs: Regions are used as as picture primitives to denote faces rather than volumes. However, lines still denote boundaries of regions, not the contours of shapes.
• ~6-8 yrs: Regions as volumes, but compensated by more modifiers, resulting in "having a smooth outline" (threading); denote regions n the visual field (starts approaching lines as contours)
• ~8-10 yrs: Finally, lines are used as picture primitives (instead of using lines for regions). Lines are finally used as contours, as evident by line junctions used for occlusion and foreshortening.

The one drawback to this approach is that, despite his critique of the overall trend against copying, his developmental trajectory does not incorporate the effects of imitation on drawing. This may not be possible for him though: there simply doesn't seem to be enough data, looked at through the right perspective, to offer his model much more (true both of when the book came out, and now).

However, overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in how children learn to draw.

Willats, John. 2005. Making Sense of Children's Drawings. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Graphical Abstracts

A friend of mine passed along this interesting link today. The academic publisher Elsevier looks like it's now accepting "graphical abstracts" for scientific papers in journals:

A Graphical Abstract should be a one-image file and should visualize one process or make one point clear. For ease of browsing, the Graphical Abstract should have a clear start and end, preferably "reading" from top to bottom or left to right. Try to reduce distracting and cluttering elements as much as possible.

Also interesting is that they expressly specify how they want the image to be "read." Now I'm curious what they'd think to an abstract using sequential images...

What is the human language faculty?

My mentor, Ray Jackendoff, has a new article out in the journal Language that mentions my research (as well as has some illustrations by me):

Jackendoff, Ray. 2011. What is the human language faculty?: Two views. Language 87(3):586-624

The piece explores the biological foundation of our capacity for language, and what components of cognition contribute to language understanding. My work comes in because he points out that several cognitive capacities involve the hierarchic organization of structures, including language, music, vision, events, and, yes, the visual narrative in comics. Here's the abstract:

In addition to providing an account of the empirical facts of language, a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive capacities and about the character of brain computation. The present discussion note compares the theoretical stance of biolinguistics (Chomsky 2005, Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011) with a constraint-based PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE approach to the language faculty (Jackendoff 2002, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). The issues considered include the necessity of redundancy in the lexicon and the rule system, the ubiquity of recursion in cognition, derivational vs. constraint-based formalisms, the relation between lexical items and grammatical rules, the roles of phonology and semantics in the grammar, the combinatorial character of thought in humans and nonhumans, the interfaces between language, thought, and vision, and the possible course of evolution of the language faculty. In each of these areas, the parallel architecture offers a superior account both of the linguistic facts and of the relation of language to the rest of the mind/brain.

Keywords:
narrow faculty of language, recursion, parallel architecture, Merge, Unification, lexicon, consciousness, evolution

Segmentations in visual narrative

Gernsbacher's 1985 paper "Surface information loss in comprehension" is an important article on the comprehension of sequential images, and one that has informed much of my current research. It is based on her dissertation, and describes several experiments.

Overall, Gernsbacher had participants read the Mercer Mayer book Frog, where are you? to question whether people can accurately recall the exact surface images in the story, or if (like language) they are only able to retain the gist of meaning.

First, she asked participants to read this "picture story" and choose where they would divide it into parts. They simply drew lines between images where they felt that one episode ended and another began. Overall, she found that people greatly agreed on where these boundaries between segments were placed.

She then asked another group of people to read the stories, but the composition of certain images were flipped horizontally. These images either came before or after the boundaries that people agreed upon in the previous experiment. She found that people had a harder time accurately remembering the horizontal composition if the image came after the boundary as opposed to before it. This provided evidence that people were building up context throughout a segment, and that the start of a new segment incurred a cost on memory.

These experiments were important for several reasons. First, it confirmed her hypothesis that people mostly retain the gist of meaning and not the surface information of images. Given that people's comprehension did not appear overly damaged by flipping the composition of images, it could be pertinent to discussions of how much impact is really made by the left-right composition of images, such as in the 180º rule.

However, more importantly, these experiments showed very strong evidence that people group images together into segments. This poses a problem to theories like McCloud's panel transitions, which  envision no stopping point for linear transitions: they keep going on and on throughout a visual narrative (either linearly or promiscuously between multiple panel relationships).

Rather, this experiment shows that people have some intuitions for dividing up visual narratives into segments (what I called in my book "visual sentences"), and that moving between those segments incurs a cost to comprehension.



Gernsbacher, Morton Ann (1985). Surface information loss in comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 17 (3), 324-363 DOI: 10.1016/0010-0285(85)90012-X

Waning days of studenthood

Tuesday will begin what looks to be my last year of grad school, which means my last year of being a student. Yikes! That means I'm currently balancing finishing my projects, helping teach classes, writing/revising papers, and looking for what's next. Should be a wild semester!

I have quite a few projects underway right now, starting with my second brainwave study looking at the comprehension of sequential images. I got some good data on this experiment over the summer with a "reaction time" experiment, so now its time to stick electrode caps on people! If all looks good with troubleshooting, we could be up and running this week.

Also, coming up in October I'll be making an appearance down at the New York ComicCon, giving a talk on my research on Saturday, October 15th. As the date gets closer, I'll offer more info.