Lab News:

Listen to Neil on the Unpacking Peanuts and Protagonist podcasts!

The Lab welcomes PhD students Lenneke Lichtenberg, Maryam Torabi, and Prajwal Prakash to the ERC funded PICTREE Project for studying the neuroscience of pictures and comics!

Upcoming Appearances

September 11-12, 2026. Table at Cross Comix Festival 2026, Rotterdam, Netherlands

November 4-6, 2026. Plenary talk at the II International Conference of the Academic Comic Studies Society together with the III Conference Teaching with Comics. Alcalá de Henares, Spain

Organizations to support

Hero Initiative

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

Selected recent publications

• Cohn, Neil, Andrew T. Hendrickson, Bruno Cardoso, Bien Klomberg, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, Ana Krajinović, Sharitha van der Gouw, Fred Atilla, Abe Simons, Tim Hankart, Nanne van Noord, Sam Titarsolej, Fernando Casanova Martínez, Tomás Gaete Altamirano, Marianna Pagkratidou, Michał Szawerna, Nicolas Verstappen, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Leandro Kruszielski, Anna Marta Marini, Gaurav Singh, Dušan Stamenković, Miloš Tasić, and Yen Na Yum. 2026. The properties of panels in global comics: Frequency and size of 76K panels in 1,030 comics from 144 countries. Language Resources and Evaluation 60 (47):1-25. (Read online)
• Ekström, Katie, Neil Cohn, and Emily Coderre. 2026. Neural Dynamics of Narrative Structure-Building in Visual Stories. Cortex. 199: 1-19
• Lichtenberg, Lenneke Doris, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, Bien Klomberg, Joost Schilperoord, and Neil Cohn. 2026. Three monkeys or one?: Continuity in the monkey emoji debate. Acta Psychologica. 264:106372.
• Cohn, Neil, Joost Schilperoord, and Bruno Cardoso. 2026. Information, iconicity, and Zipf’s law of abbreviation in visual languages of global comics. Language and Cognition 18 (e12):1-15.
• Cohn, Neil, Filip van der Vegt, Fred Atilla, and Bruno Cardoso. 2025. Going with the comics flow: A theoretical and empirical basis for flow in comics. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics: 1-18. (PDF)
• Hacımusaoğlu, Irmak, Bruno Cardoso, and Neil Cohn. 2025. Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality: a corpus analysis of motion events in global comics Multimodal Communication
• Krajinović, Ana, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, Bruno Cardoso, and Neil Cohn. 2025. Mark the unexpected! Animacy preference and goal-directed movement in visual language. Cognitive Science 49 (5):e70067

Emoji Research