Random!... panel sequences that is

As long as we're on the topic of comics that people clip out for me, here's another one that my advisor passed along. For some reason, he's rather partial to Zippy the Pinhead (I think because of the philosophy jokes), and this one caught his eye. Particularly this first panel over to the side.

Zippy it seems comes from the Non-sequitur school of panel transitions (if you're into that sort of thing).

What makes this fun for me is that my next experiment is actually going to use various scrambled strips to help illustrate the differences in processing between those and normal strips (plus some other more complex strip types).

Not much is out there about this sort of research, but one study did show that people's comprehension of sequential "picture stories" (Mercer Mayer stories) correlated with their comprehension for text. Skilled readers showed a drop in recollection for scrambled compared to regular sequences. However, unskilled readers showed no comprehension differences at all.

I'm a bit dubious that fluency in visual language is comparable to general comprehension skills (they used no measure for graphic fluency), but this study at least showed some support for a domain general capacity.

Panel Time!

1.5 seconds per panel. That's how long it takes on average for wordless panels to be read.

I recently completed a very exciting study that asked people to read four-panel comic strips one panel at a time. In this "Self-Paced Reading" task, they see four boxes on the screen, and with each button press a subsequent panel appears in the sequence. Only one panel is shown on the screen at a time.

While they do this, the computer records how long it takes them to move from each panel to the next. By manipulating the strip in various ways, I'm able to tell if certain manipulations have a greater impact on the reading from the original "normal" sequence.

I'm not going to go into the intricacies of the experiment (you can wait for the write up for that), but I thought I'd share some tidbits.

For instance, for "normal" wordless four panel Peanuts strips, it takes a person on average 1.5 seconds per panel. The first panel is usually read relatively slow (1.7), the second panel is fastest (1.3), then third is slightly less fast (1.5), then fourth is back to where the first was (1.7).

An interesting side note about this: since all these panels were the same size, yet were read at different speeds, it might imply a rejection of McCloud's claim that panel sizes affect reading time (which thereby somehow affects narrative time). However, this experiment didn't test that specifically, and no alternations in panel sizes nor layouts were given either. So, I can't say anything conclusive about that.

This was a very exciting project for me to complete, because it marks the first time I've (anyone has?) looked at data like this for how people understand sequential images.