Zooming in on visual narrative comprehension
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Zooming in on visual narrative comprehension Tom Foulsham 1 & Neil Cohn 2 Accepted: 16 September 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract The comprehension of visual narratives requires paying attention to certain elements and integrating them across a sequence of images. To study this process, we developed a new approach that modified comic strips according to where observers looked while viewing each sequence. Across three self-paced experiments, we presented sequences of six panels that were sometimes automatically “zoomed-in” or re-framed in order to highlight parts of the image that had been fixated by another group of observers. Fixation zoom panels were rated as easier to understand and produced viewing times more similar to the original comic than panels modified to contain non-fixated or incongruous regions. When a single panel depicting the start of an action was cropped to show only the most fixated region, viewing times were similar to the original narrative despite the reduced information. Modifying such panels also had an impact on the viewing time on subsequent panels, both when zoomed in and when regions were highlighted through an “inset” panel. These findings demonstrate that fixations in a visual narrative are guided to informative elements, and that these elements influence both the current panel and the processing of the sequence. Keywords Visual language . Visual narrative . Comics . Attention
Introduction Visual narratives, such as those in comics, carry meaning via a sequence of images. The way in which observers “read” such sequences has become a topic of interest for a range of cognitive scientists (Cohn, 2020; Foulsham, Wybrow & Cohn, 2016; Loschky, Magliano, Larson, & Smith, 2020). This interest has focused both on the constraints guiding narrative sequencing (Cohn, 2020) and on the way that context interacts with one’s perception of an image (Foulsham, Wybrow, & Cohn, 2016; Loschky et al., 2020; Hutson, Magliano, & Loschky, 2018). Rather than being perceived in isolation, each panel of a comic strip is designed to be appreciated in the context of the surrounding events. Visual narratives can be comprehended quickly (Laubrock, Hohenstein, & Kümmerer, 2018), even when they do not contain words or formal language (Hagmann & Cohn, 2016; Inui & Miyamoto, 1981).
* Tom Foulsham [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK
2
Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
However, there is little experimental work investigating what people attend to within a visual narrative, or how this may affect the speed or ease of comprehension. In the present study, we manipulate the framing of panels in a comic strip and examine the effects on viewing time (VT). It could be that removing any visual content will make the process of visual narrative comprehension more difficult – because additional inference will be required. However, here we frame panels to selectively highlight the details that are f
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