nCOGNITO - Papers in Cognitive Cultural Studies

Media and genre characteristics of the direction of attention

2025-01-22T07:20:30+01:00

Jelen folyóiratszám az előző szám folytatásaként a figyelemirányítás különböző mediális formáit vizsgálja. A vizsgált narratív médiumok sokfélesége jól tükrözi a figyelemirányítás mint kutatási terület széles skáláját. A tanulmányok irodalmi regényeket, filmeket, képeskönyveket, képregényeket és műfajspecifikus műveket ölelnek fel, és olyan témákat járnak körül, amelyek a figyelem összpontosításának a narratív jelentés strukturálásában betöltött szerepétől kezdve, kép és szöveg medialitása közötti figyelemmegosztáson keresztül a figyelem irányításának vagy elterelésének kognitív következményeiig terjednek.

Internal and external attention in the film

2024-09-16T22:38:08+02:00

As a multimodal artistic medium, film is perhaps the most powerful in directing attention based on sensory perception. I present research findings that, on the one hand, support film's highly effective ability to direct attention by engaging the senses and, on the other hand, demonstrate how this interacts with internal attention control. The research suggests that internal cognitive patterns significantly moderate the direction of attention based on external sensory stimuli in films.

“Everything goes dark in the blink of an eye”

2024-10-14T12:22:12+02:00

The paper attempts to find a connection between the patterns of attention direction in poetry, the aspect of genre schemas and the linguistic phenomenon of person marking, within the theoretical framework of the forthcoming ELTE-Lírakorpusz. In Péter Závada's volume A muréna mozgása ‘The Movement of the Murena’, there are several works that reflect on the process of observation, the (visual) direction of attention, and offer the possibility of a more traditional (transcending) meaning-making procedure (Ingamozgás/A szó árnyéka ’Pendulum motion/The shadow of a word’, Ingamozgás/A kalapács árnyéka ’Pendulum motion/The shadow of a hammer’, Munkajegyzetek/A felvezetés értelme ’Working notes/The meaning of the introduction’, Egy alma határai ‘The boundaries of an apple’). With a thorough analysis, I map the modes of poetic attentional control in the volume, adopting the categories proposed by Lucy Alford about transitive and intransitive poetic attention. And since these categories also define genre schemas in Alford’s model, the second step of the analysis examine the characteristics of person marking in the texts relying on the conclusions of genre classification, with the aim of mapping genre-specific features on the one hand, and on the other, in search of connections towards a cognitive poetic reinterpretation of certain lyric genres.

Narrative space as an element of the attentional background in Zsigmond Móricz’s short story "Tragedy"

2024-10-22T19:22:03+02:00

This paper aims to contribute to the existing body of research by examining the secondary role of narrative space in relation to plot within the framework of classical
narratological theories and cognitive poetics. Drawing on a cognitive psychological model of attentional processes and Roland Barthes’ claims about the structure of narrative works, including indexical signs, it argues, based on research in cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics, that the secondary role of narrative space is due to its function in supporting attentional selection and the fundamental metaphorical nature of language. This investigation is illustrated through an analysis of Zsigmond Móricz’s short story Tragedy.

Task-oriented attention and detective fiction

2024-12-01T17:53:07+01:00

The detective novel is one of the most schematically structured genres, and therefore one that readers have high expectations of in terms of the narrative structure and the way in which the plot is constructed. Furthermore, readers anticipate the appearance of specific character types and plot elements. Additionally, they expect writers to deliberately direct their attention. This is achieved by focusing on seemingly insignificant details and distracting readers from important clues. This makes the mystery more challenging to solve and provides an exciting challenge. The reader's attention is thus trained to the peculiarities of the genre in a manner analogous to how it is directed towards a task: it focuses on the task at hand while avoiding events that are not pertinent to it. The principal argument of this study is that the detective novel employs genre-specific attentional control techniques that put the reader’s attentional system in a state of conflict: concentrated attention versus automatic perception, and exogenous versus endogenous attention are in constant tension with each other. In the initial section of the paper, I will delineate the task-oriented attentional functioning that is characteristic of detective fiction. Subsequently, through an analysis of Bence Hidas’s crime novel And the Snow Covers Everything, I will demonstrate how detective stories employ attentional narrative techniques and how they entice the reader into the trap of their own attentional functioning.

The first steps in literary learning

2024-11-04T10:02:57+01:00

Reception of picturebooks, which takes place in the early stages of visual and literary literacy, is possible when a young child has a certain level of attentional capacity. In the introduction to this study, I will first examine the relationship between attentional processes and picturebook reception among the youngest recipients, because already here we can find connections that will play a role later on (habituation - dishabituation, social and cultural frameworks for shaping and motivating attention). I will then look at the media-specific procedures of directing attention in relation to the representation of narrative and the interaction between foregrounding and literacy. In this context, I assume that in the picturebook, image and text contribute separately to the creation of cognitive emphases, and the relationships between them are ranging from stylistically neutral parallel narratives to stylistically foregrounded counterpoint or contradictory relationships. Since in the latter case divergent narratives are accompanied by counterpointing or opposing perspectives, the use of idiosyncratic perspectives is one of the most common means in children's picturebooks to achieve significant cognitive changes in the target audience.

On the one hand, the examples studied show that picturebooks generally try to direct the attention of the inexperienced reader in a clear way, but at the same time some of them also try to renew the reader's expectations and routines by using more unusual techniques and leaving more room for the reader's activity. As unusual stylistic elements attract the attention of the audience, they also play an important role in the acquisition of interpretive skills and literary competence.

Focusing on panels and bubbles

2024-12-13T08:59:17+01:00

Comics constitute a hybrid form of art, which has a history long enough to have its own established scientific discipline, but still too young to be considered equivalent
with other forms of artistic medium in scholarship and in the artistic world. The present study discusses different aspects of comics, focusing on reader reception and the interpretation of its visual and textual components, in order to gain a more profound understanding of how the narrative properties unique to this genre capture and direct attention in the process of reading. After providing a definition of the comic strip, the paper first examines the characteristics and the typical cognitive traps of multimodal complexes, following Borkent’s (2024) argumentation. The discussion then moves on to review the co-interpretation processes of visual and textual elements, including the role of panels and gutters as graphic tools in organizing these elements as well as the transgression of their conventional functions. These phenomena are illustrated through examples from comics and other media using the reading mechanisms typical of the comic strip. The final section of the paper is dedicated to the speech bubble, a fundamental tool in comics.