Visual Language Lab

Blog

New paper: Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?

My latest paper has now been published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review entitled “Visual Narrative Comprehension: Universal or not?” This paper explores to what degree sequences of images are universally transparent, and questions this basic assumption that everyone can easily understand a sequence of images with no learning or decoding. This has been a pervasive…
Interview with A. David Lewis

I had the pleasure of being interviewed on a streaming video with the comics scholar A. David Lewis recently, and he’s now posted the video online! His primary line of questioning is whether my neurocognitive research could be considered a complementary side of Graphic Medicine (the field that uses graphics and comics to communicate and…
ERC Starting Grant for Visual Language research

I’m very happy to officially announce that I have received an ERC Starting Grant! This is my first major individual research grant (after many many tries), and I’m very excited to have the chance to work on a project I’ve been planning for over 10 years. My project “Visual narratives as a window into language…
New paper: Structural complexity in visual narratives

2019 so far has been a flurry of published papers for me, and here’s yet another. My paper “Structural complexity in visual narratives: Theory, brains, and cross-cultural diversity” is now published in the book collection Narrative Complexity and Media: Experiential and Cognitive Interfaces. The book is an extensive resource (468 pages!) including many chapters about…
New paper: The neurophysiology of event processing in language and visual events

In yet another one of my recent publications, here is a book chapter that’s been awaiting publication for many years. My paper with my dear departed friend, Martin Paczynski, “The neurophysiology of event processing in language and visual events” is now finally published in the Oxford Handbook of Event Structure. Our chapter gives an overview…
New paper: Visual narratives and the Mind

My latest paper, “Visual narratives and the mind: Comprehension, cognition, and learning” is published in the collection Psychology of Learning and Motivation. This paper integrates a few threads of research that I’ve been working on lately. The first section presents the cognitive processes that go into understanding a sequence of images, integrating two of the…
New paper: Being explicit about the implicit

My cascade of recent new papers continues with my latest paper, “Being explicit about the implicit: inference generating techniques in visual narrative“, which has recently been published open access in Language and Cognition. This is a paper that was gestating for quite awhile, and it’s fun to finally see it published. This paper is about…
New paper: Your brain on comics

I’m very excited to announce the publication of my newest paper,”Your brain on comics: A cognitive model of visual narrative comprehension” in Topics in Cognitive Science. This journal issue is actually a themed issue edited by me about visual narratives, and this paper is my personal contribution. This paper in many ways is a culmination…
Knowing the rules of comic page layouts

One of my more engaged-with blog posts of recent memory reviewed the data for whether the panel arrangement on the right was “confusing.” So, here’s a post with some additional thoughts on this and the “rules” of comic page layouts**… First off, let me remind people that I’ve given this layout a name: When you have a…
2018: My publications in review

The last few years I’ve closed out the year by summarizing all of my papers that came out (2016, 2017), and so this year I’m doing the same. It’s been a diverse year of papers, with some theoretical papers, a few brainwave papers carried out by colleagues, and a corpus study. So, here are the…