How specific is the cognitive experience of the comics reader? Formulating hypothesis through empirical experiments

6 December 2023 - 10am-12pm | ULB, Brussels, Solbosch Campus, Room P4.1.17.

Illustration © Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, 1986, DC Comics.

Abstract
The complex morphology of the comics medium calls for peculiar reading strategies aimed at bridging the gaps between its components, both structural and material. Although we speak broadly of visual literacy, in the case of comics it is necessary to consider specific skills of information synthesis and translinear reading. My research focuses on the distance between the implied reader and the actual reader, that is, it aims to understand how the latter behaves with respect to the cognitive effort virtually solicited by the comics form.

I and my team in Reggio Emilia developed two empirical experiments to compare the cognitive experience of the comics reader to that of prose readers in different modalities (individual reading and collective reading aloud). Through qualitative analysis of the participants’ responses to a questionnaire, three aspects of the reading experience were distinctly evaluated: comprehension, memory, and engagement. Based on the early results, we began to outline a cognitive framework that can map the relative difficulties (and also relative facilitations) entailed in comics reading specifically. I’ll discuss the tentative findings of this study and the design of the new test I’m currently developing, based this time on an intramedial comparison.

Antonio Mirizzi (1995) is a PhD student at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He is currently working on a tentative framework describing the cognitive experience of the comics readers but his research topics also include narrative complexity (especially in comics), comics seriality and the reshaping of the novel form in comics. Along with academic commitments, he works as a comic writer and artist, while teaching history and theory of comics in private courses addressed to both adults and children. He has recently published an essay dedicated to the work of serial author Leo Ortolani, Rat-Man. La Scimmia, il Topo e il Supereroe (2013), originally his Master’s thesis.