Joseph P. Magliano is a professor of Educational Psychology in the Department of Learning Sciences at Georgia State University.

Narratives are conveyed in language (oral, text) and visually (film, sequential picture stories). How does the medium in which we experience a narrative affect our comprehension of it? There is a case to be made that there are common processes that operate across media. However, different media require distinct skills and may have unique affordances that have important implications for comprehension. As such, the question posed above is fundamental to cognitive science, but one that requires more attention than it has received thus far in the literature. In this presentation, Joseph P. Magliano will present a program of research to explore the affordances of media in supporting different aspects of comprehension. These studies explore the affordances of media in the context of a think aloud task. Computational analyses of the think aloud responses showed differences across the media in terms of situational information that is mentioned in the responses and coherence building. While there are likely common aspects of comprehension across media, there are important differences that are likely grounded in differences media affordances in mental model construction.