Constructing spatial situation models during reading comics vs texts

When reading comics, do people monitor the protagonist’s spatial shifts in their mental representations of the depicted environment? To answer that we examined the location effect: the well-documented finding that information about the room in which the protagonist is located is more accessible compared to other rooms. Across three experiments, participants first encoded object locations visually (Experiments 1 and 2) or verbally (Experiment 3), and then, while reading stories, they responded to prompts about whether objects were in the same or different rooms. In Experiment 1, participants read either comics or texts, and were instructed to attend to spatial relations. Consistent with the location effect, participants were faster when objects were located in the room that the protagonist was at the time compared to other rooms. This was the case in both reading conditions, suggesting that there is no difference of how foregrounding operates between texts and comics, at least when people are instructed to attend to spatial information. In Experiment 2 participants read either comics or texts, and they were not given any instructions to attend to spatial relations. Participants exhibited a location effect when reading comics but not when reading texts, suggesting that with comics, instructions are not necessary to support the monitoring of the protagonist’s movement. In Experiment 3, the objects were encoded verbally rather than visually prior to reading a story in comics. There was no location effect suggesting that, in comics, monitoring the protagonist’s spatial shifts takes place only when the environment is encoded visually. Overall, findings suggest that comics can support the construction of situation models and may even be more efficient to foreground spatial shifts than texts.