Mental events in visual narratives

Stories often show us not only what happens in the storyworld, but also what happens in a character’s mind

Look at the comic on this page: It shows a PhD candidate working day in, day out; busy writing, teaching, reading, and then, graduating! But wait – that event turns out to be just a dream.

While the graduation event appears abruptly, it can make sense when readers see it as a character’s thoughts or mental experience (such as a dream!). So, we have to combine two storyworld domains: a physical domain that all characters can see and a mental domain, that happens only in the mind.

How do visual narratives show these mental domains? How do readers understand these events? And what kind of cues help readers realize that mental events do not physically take place? 

These are the questions that I investigate in my (upcoming) publications.

Publications and plans

This recent publication describes how readers understand mental events in stories, and what cues help readers to notice that there is a mental domain. This work shows it is not only about meaning, but that graphic and structural cues are just as important. Changes in colour, panel borders, layout, morphology, and grammar all help readers to infer a mental domain.

This soon-to-be-published set of experiments tests how readers respond to  mental domains in visual narratives. The results show that readers need a bit more time to get through these mental events in stories, but that they understand them very well. Moreover, similarity across panels helps readers to process mental domains, which supports our theory’s idea that graphic features play an important role.

(Dis)continuity

My dissertation (set to come out in February) includes a brand new corpus study (over 700+ comics!) that looks at mental domains in comics from over the whole world. This study investigates how often mental events occur and how these panels differ from other panels (those that show the ‘normal’ physical storyworld). It also looks at what cues are used to point out these mental events (e.g. colour, panel borders, layout on the page) and whether different global regions show mental events in the same way.