Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sequential images have frequently been used as experimentalstimuli in the cognitive and psychological sciences to exploretopics like theory of mind, temporal cognition, discourse,social intelligence, and event sequencing, among others. Theassumption has been that sequential images provide a fairlyuniversal and transparent stimuli that require little to nolearning to decode, and thus are ideal for non-verbal tasks indevelopmental, clinical, and non-literate populations.However, decades of cross-cultural and developmentalresearch have actually suggested something different: thatsequential image comprehension is contingent on exposureand practice with a graphic system. I here review thisliterature and advocate for more sensitivity to the “fluency”needed to understand sequential images.