The role of character goals and changes in body position in the processing of events in visual narratives

Background A growing body of research is beginning to understand how people comprehend sequential visual narratives. However, previous work has used materials that primarily rely on visual information (i.e., they contain minimal language information). The current work seeks to address how visual and linguistic information streams are coordinated in sequential image comprehension. In experiment 1, participants viewed picture stories and engaged in an event segmentation task. The extent to which critical points in the narrative depicted situational continuity of character goals and continuity in bodily position was manipulated. The likelihood of perceiving an event boundary and viewing latencies at critical locations were measured. Experiment 1 was replicated in the second experiment, without the segmentation task. That is, participants read the picture stories without deciding where the event boundaries occurred.