Blog

  • New article: The architecture of visual narrative comprehension

    I’m happy to announce that I have a new article out in the journal Frontiers in Psychology titled “The architecture of visual narrative comprehension: the interaction of narrative structure and page layout in understanding comics.” This is a “Focused Review,” so it summarizes the research that has been done on narrative structure, page layouts, and…

  • Travel plans and Mailbag

    I leave for my upcoming Germany trip on Monday! I’m very excited about the workshops and can’t wait to jump into them. As it turns out, I’ve been invited to yet another conference in Germany held in Berlin this September, so I’ll be headed back out there in a few months as well! I’ll keep…

  • Coming soon to Germany…

    I’m very excited that my workshops in Germany are only a month away! I’ll first be making a stop at Saarland University for a talk about the structure of events  on June 18th.Then the more extensive visits begin… I’ll be speaking on Saturday, June 21st at the University of Freiburg for an all day workshop.…

  • Visual Language research galore!

    Can I brag for a moment? Not about me, really, but about my students! This quarter I’m teaching a course on the “Cognition of Comics” for the UCSD Cognitive Science Department. While the classes do discuss experiments and studies that have been done related to how people understand comics, and how they differ across cultures,…

  • Post-talk and new Spanish article

    Thanks to everyone who came out to hear my talk at WonderCon on Sunday! I got great questions and really enjoyed the discussion after the talk with people who hung around. The Con itself was pretty fun as well. As I commented with several people, it felt like ComicCon was back 20 years ago. And,…

  • Wondercon and updates

    Just a reminder that I’ll be speaking at WonderCon in Anaheim this weekend! My talk on the Cognition  of Comics is going to be at 11:30 on Sunday. Hope to see you there! Here’s the description: What happens in people’s minds and brains when they read and create comics? Neil Cohn (University of California, San Diego) will…

  • The Visual Language Fluency Index

    One of the interesting findings throughout many of my experiments is that the comprehension of sequential images seems to be modulated by participants’ “comic reading expertise.” These effects are predicted by my theory of “visual language”… If drawings and sequential images are indeed structured like language, then we should expect varying degrees of “fluency” across…

  • Classes, speaking, and books… oh my!

    I’m currently enjoying getting work done on my spring break, and have lots of fun news to report! 1. Classes! First, I just completed grading the final exams for my very fun course on the “Language of Comics” for UCSD’s Linguistics Department. Finals are always a chore to grade (even with my trusty TA), but…

  • June workshops in Germany!

    I’m excited to announce that I have several upcoming appearances in Germany this June! It looks like I’ll be having two main open workshops… The first will be at the University of Freiburg throughout the day on Saturday, June 21st. I was invited to do this event by Stephan Packard, and it will be sponsored by…

  • New article: Framing “I can’t draw”

    I’m happy to say that I have a new article (pdf) published in the journal Culture & Psychology! This one continues with my theories about how people learn how to draw. In my previous article (pdf), I argued that drawings were structured like languages, and that learning how to draw involves learning a “visual vocabulary”…