Lab News:

The Lab welcomes new PhD students Lenneke Lichtenberg, Maryam Torabi, and Prajwal Prakash to the PICTREE Project!

Neil Cohn received an ERC Consolidator grant to study the neuroscience of pictures and comics!

Congrats to Lenneke Lichtenberg on her first paper, “Understanding lightbulb moments”!

Upcoming Speaking

Feb. 21-23, 2026. Keynote. Iconicity in Language and Literature/IcoSem 2026. Nagoya, Japan

June 10-13, 2026. The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) Conference 2026

Organizations to support

Hero Initiative

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

Recent publications

• Cohn, Neil, Filip van der Vegt, Fred Atilla, and Bruno Cardoso. 2025. Going with the comics flow: A theoretical and empirical basis for flow in comics. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics: 1-18. (PDF)
• Hacımusaoğlu, Irmak, Bruno Cardoso, and Neil Cohn. 2025. Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality: a corpus analysis of motion events in global comics Multimodal Communication
• Lichtenberg, Lenneke Doris, Bien Klomberg, Joost Schilperoord, and Neil Cohn. 2025. Understanding Lightbulb Moments: Meaning-making in visual morphology from comics and emoji. Memory and Cognition
• Krajinović, Ana, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, Bruno Cardoso, and Neil Cohn. 2025. Mark the unexpected! Animacy preference and goal-directed movement in visual language. Cognitive Science 49 (5):e70067
• Upadhyayula, Aditya and Neil Cohn. 2025. A computational framework to study hierarchical processing in visual narratives. Cognitive Science. 49(5): e70050
• Cohn, Neil, Fred Atilla, Lenneke Lichtenberg, and Bruno Cardoso. 2025. The influence of writing systems on comics layouts. Cognition 260 (106136):1-8.
• Cohn, Neil and Joost Schilperoord. 2025. Language Acquisition in the Multimodal Parallel Architecture: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek. First Language.

Emoji Research