Constructing spatial situation models during reading comics versus 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, that is, the well-documented finding that information about the room in which the protagonist is located is more accessible compared to other rooms. Across two experiments, participants first encoded object locations visually (Experiments 1a and 1b) or verbally (Experiment 2), and then, while reading stories, via texts or comics, they responded to prompts about whether objects were in the same or different rooms. In Experiments 1a and 2, but not 1b, participants were instructed to attend to spatial relations. Participants monitored spatial shifts with texts and comics when the environment was encoded visually (Experiments 1a and 1b). However, with comics, participants monitored shifts even without instructions to attend to spatial relations. Overall, findings suggest that comics can support the construction of situation models and may even be more efficient to foreground spatial shifts than texts.