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Individual differences in the neural dynamics of visual narrative comprehension: The effects of proficiency and age of acquisition

Coderre,Emily L. L.
; 
Cohn,Neil
Abstract
Understanding visual narrative sequences, as found in comics, is known to recruit similar cognitive mechanisms to verbal language. As measured by event-related potentials (ERPs), these manifest as initial negativities (N400, LAN) and subsequent positivities (P600). While these components are thought to index discrete processing stages, they differentially arise across participants for any given stimulus. In language contexts, proficiency modulates brain responses, with smaller N400 effects and larger P600 effects appearing with increasing proficiency. In visual narratives, recent work has also emphasized the role of proficiency in neural response patterns. We thus explored whether individual differences in proficiency modulate neural responses to visual narrative sequencing in similar ways as in language. We combined ERP data from 12 studies examining semantic and/or grammatical processing of visual narrative sequences. Using linear mixed effects modeling, we demonstrate differential effects of visual language proficiency and "age of acquisition" on N400 and P600 responses. Our results align with those reported in language contexts, providing further evidence for the similarity of linguistic and visual narrative processing, and emphasize the role of both proficiency and age of acquisition in visual narrative comprehension.
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© 2023. The Author(s).
Date
2024
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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Keywords
Age of acquisition, Comics, Event-related potentials, Proficiency, Visual language, Visual narratives
Citation
Coderre, E L L & Cohn, N 2024, 'Individual differences in the neural dynamics of visual narrative comprehension : The effects of proficiency and age of acquisition', Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 89-103. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02334-x
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/80241
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