Last month I participated in the Cognitive Science Society conference, where I presented my paper on the “Underspecification and communicative efficiency of visual affixes of motion in comics”. You can read it here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p30w93g. Or download the pdf directly here.
Below you can see our poster (here as pdf), designed as a visual abstract. In this paper, we asked whether the visual symbols used for indicating motion in comics, motion and circumfixing lines, follow the efficient pattern found in spoken language, which could elucidate the meaning of these visual symbols. In spoken language, shorter words are more ambiguous and more frequent. Since circumfixing lines are more ambiguous than motion lines, we asked whether they are also smaller and more frequent, just like words in spoken language. We found that circumfixing lines are smaller but not more frequent than motion lines. The size difference is consistent with our expectations of efficient behavior, while the frequency result might be explained by comic-specific requirements and artistic styles.
