Comics vs. Covid: informing and evaluating the design of public health information comics

Engaging people of all ages and abilities effectively with often complex public health information has never been more important than it is now. Comics can convey complex, nuanced information in ways that engage people of all ages and literacy levels, and thus have been used successfully to promote public health campaigns. Moreover, they have been used to convey a wide range of public health messages during the COVID-19 pandemic. This interdisciplinary project will determine how readers engage with public health information comics and how this links to changes in the readers' knowledge and attitudes about the health messages contained in the comics. Specifically, we will consider how engagement with, understanding of and attitudes toward public health messages depend on (1) design choices in the creation of public health comics, (2) the target group of readers and (3) the health topic covered in the comic. The project combines Tatler's expertise on eye tracking and visual perception with Murray's expertise on comics studies, and benefits from a successful history of interdisciplinary collaboration between the two supervisors. By recording eye movements as participants read comics, we will measure precisely the moment-to-moment visual sampling of comics. Linking eye-movement data to questionnaire data collected before and after reading will allow us to identify objective markers of visual engagement that predict changes in knowledge and attitudes of the reader. The findings will reveal the mechanisms by which key information in comics is encoded into memory, providing theoretical advances in the Psychology of multi-modal perception and memory and informing data-driven theory development in Comics Studies. Moreover, the work will enable the development of protocols for objectively assessing the effectiveness of health comics in conveying their messages to the public and lead to recommendations for designing health comics that are optimised for the specific target audience and topic.