Neil Cohn

Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist internationally recognized for his research on the overlap of the structure and cognition of sequential images and language. He received his doctorate in Psychology from Tufts University working with the renowned linguist Ray Jackendoff. Having originally started working in the comic industry as a teenager, his creative work includes We the People (with Thom Hartmann, 2004), Meditations (2005), and A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning (by Ray Jackendoff, 2012).

In 2003 he released his first book on this research, Early Writings on Visual Language, and his most recent book, The Visual Language of Comics (Bloomsbury, 2013), introduced a framework for studying visual narratives in the cognitive sciences, followed by his edited compilation The Visual Narrative Reader (Bloomsbury, 2015). His new book, Who Understands Comics (Bloomsbury, 2020) explores how cultural expertise interacts with the neurocognitive processes that go into comprehending visual narratives.

He is currently an Associate Professor of Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands. His work is online at www.visuallanguagelab.com.