Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans have drawn sequential images as a means ofexpression throughout history, from cave paintings andfrescoes to wall-carvings and tapestries (McCloud, 1993). Incontemporary society, we find them most prevalently incomics of the world, and over the past two decades,increasing attention has turned to this communicativesystem in the cognitive sciences.Earlier work often focused on theory alone, drawing fromparadigms in linguistics or semiotics (for review, see Cohn,2012; Wildfeuer & Bateman, 2016) or from theoristsoutside academia (e.g., McCloud, 1993). However, newerstudies test theoretical predictions with empirical corpusanalyses and both behavioral and neurocognitiveexperimentation. As in language research, combining thesemethodologies provides converging evidence on thestructure of visual narratives, their diversity across theworld, and their comprehension by minds and brains.Recent research has especially focused on the overlappingcognition between the processing of the “visual languages”constituting drawn visual narratives and the linguisticsystems of verbal and signed languages (Cohn, 2013;Magliano, Larson, Higgs, & Loschky, 2015). Thesepresentations further such analyses, and explore questionsrelated to the degree to which these visual languages sharemechanisms with linguistic and other cognitive systems.