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Join us for the

Visual Language Conference 2024 (VisLang2024)

27-28 June 2024

Registration now open!


New lab members!

Welcome to our new visiting PhD student Katje Varkentin who is working on visual narrative comprehension and aging!

Upcoming Events

June 9 2024. Talk at the Picture Worlds Exhibition. Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

September 5-7 2024. Keynote talk. AmLAP Conference. Edinburgh, Scotland

Organizations to support

Hero Initiative

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

Reading with Pictures

Latest Blog Post

  • 2022: My publications in review

    I’m a little late to post it, but in keeping with my annual tradition, here’s a rundown of all the papers I published in 2022. There were a lot of […]


Recent papers

Cohn, Neil, Lincy van Middelaar, Tom Foulsham, and Joost Schilperoord. 2024. Anaphoric distance dependencies in visual narrative structure and processingCognitive Psychology. 149: 101639

Lindfors, Hanna, Kristina Hansson, Eric Pakulak, Neil Cohn, Annika Andersson. 2024. Semantic Processing of Verbal Narratives is Associated to Semantic Processing of Visual Narratives: An ERP Study of School-Aged Children. Frontiers in Psychology. 14

Hacımusaoğlu, Irmak and Neil Cohn. 2023. The meaning of motion lines?: A review of theoretical and empirical research on static depiction of motionCognitive Science. 47 (11):e13377

Atilla, Fred, Bien Klomberg, Bruno Cardoso, Neil Cohn. 2023. Background Check: Cross-Cultural Differences in the Spatial Context of Comic ScenesMultimodal Communication.

Books on Visual Language

The Patterns of Comics
Released December 2023!

Who Understands Comics? Book
2021 Eisner Award Nominee
The Visual Narrative Reader
The Visual Language of Comics