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

有效地吸引各种年龄和能力的人了解往往复杂的公共卫生信息，从未像现在这样重要。漫画可以以各种方式传达复杂而微妙的信息，吸引所有年龄和文化水平的人，因此已成功地用于促进公共卫生运动。此外，在2019冠状病毒病大流行期间，它们还被用来传达广泛的公共卫生信息。这一跨学科项目将确定读者如何参与公共卫生信息漫画，以及这如何与读者对漫画中所载健康信息的知识和态度的变化联系起来。具体来说，我们将考虑对公共卫生信息的参与、理解和态度如何取决于(1)公共卫生漫画创作中的设计选择，(2)目标读者群体和(3)漫画中涵盖的健康主题。该项目结合了Tatler在眼动追踪和视觉感知方面的专业知识和Murray在漫画研究方面的专业知识，并受益于两位导师之间跨学科合作的成功历史。通过记录参与者阅读漫画时的眼球运动，我们将精确测量漫画的实时视觉采样。将眼动数据与阅读前后收集的问卷数据联系起来，将使我们能够识别视觉参与的客观标记，从而预测读者的知识和态度的变化。这些发现将揭示漫画中关键信息编码到记忆中的机制，为多模态感知和记忆心理学提供理论进展，并为漫画研究的数据驱动理论发展提供信息。此外，这项工作将有助于制定方案，客观评估健康漫画向公众传达信息的有效性，并为设计针对特定目标受众和主题进行优化的健康漫画提出建议。

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.