Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2021 Feb 15;6(1):8. doi: 10.1186/s41235-021-00270-9.
Research in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped "action stars" where a reader knows events are undepicted at that moment, rather than omitted entirely. We contrasted the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to visual narratives depicting an explicit event, an action star, or a "noise" panel of scrambled lines. Both action stars and noise panels evoked large N400s compared to explicit-events (300-500 ms), but action stars and noise panels then differed in their later effects (500-900 ms). Action stars elicited sustained negativities and P600s, which could indicate further interpretive processes and integration of meaning into a mental model, while noise panels evoked late frontal positivities possibly indexing that they were improbable narrative units. Nevertheless, panels following action stars and noise panels both evoked late sustained negativities, implying further inferential processing. Inference in visual narratives thus uses cascading mechanisms resembling those in language processing that differ based on the inferential techniques.
口头和视觉叙事的研究通常强调回溯推理，即随后推断缺失的信息。然而，漫画使用了星状的“动作之星”等惯例，读者知道在那一刻有事件没有被描绘出来，而不是完全省略。我们对比了描绘一个明确事件、一个动作之星或一个乱序线条的“噪音”面板的视觉叙事的事件相关脑电位（ERPs）。与明确事件相比，动作之星和噪音面板都引起了较大的 N400（300-500ms），但动作之星和噪音面板随后在其后期效应（500-900ms）上有所不同。动作之星引起持续的负性和 P600，可以表明进一步的解释过程和将意义整合到心理模型中，而噪音面板引起后期额叶正性可能表明它们是不太可能的叙事单元。然而，动作之星和噪音面板之后的面板都引起了持续的后期负性，这意味着进一步的推理处理。因此，视觉叙事中的推理使用了类似于语言处理的级联机制，这些机制基于推理技术而有所不同。
