A starring role for inference in the neurocognition of visual narratives
Cohn,Neil
Cohn,Neil
Abstract
Research in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped "action stars" where a reader knows events are undepicted at that moment, rather than omitted entirely. We contrasted the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to visual narratives depicting an explicit event, an action star, or a "noise" panel of scrambled lines. Both action stars and noise panels evoked large N400s compared to explicit-events (300-500 ms), but action stars and noise panels then differed in their later effects (500-900 ms). Action stars elicited sustained negativities and P600s, which could indicate further interpretive processes and integration of meaning into a mental model, while noise panels evoked late frontal positivities possibly indexing that they were improbable narrative units. Nevertheless, panels following action stars and noise panels both evoked late sustained negativities, implying further inferential processing. Inference in visual narratives thus uses cascading mechanisms resembling those in language processing that differ based on the inferential techniques.
Description
Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s).
Date
2021-02-15
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Visual language, Inference, Visual narrative, Discourse, Comics
Citation
Cohn, N 2021, 'A starring role for inference in the neurocognition of visual narratives', Cognitive research: principles and implications, vol. 6, no. 1, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00270-9
License
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess