Child psychologists are no Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud packed the house at MIT. It was a friendly audience, full of comics fans and coders. He was on a year long tour promoting Making Comics and had perhaps the most entertaining, polished, fast-paced Powerpoint presentation I have ever seen outside of a video of a TED talk. As befits a theorist of visual communication who is famous for phrases like "juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence" this was no simple reading of text printed on overly dense slides. His hour of constant patter wove in and out of a complex dance with the sequence of photos, drawings, and occasional words displayed on screen at a rate of hundreds per hour. It was early in the tour, but the talk was, as they say, smooth as butter.

Yesterday I took Miriam to UCLA BabyLab to take part in a psycholinguistic study. We sat in front of a TV with eye tracking equipment built in that could identify where on the screen she was looking. For about ten minutes, arrays of toys and dots appeared on the screen in different patterns, in a line, a cross, a square, and a friendly white person voice asked us to "Find the toy in the middle. Where is the toy in the middle?" or on the left, or on the bottom, etc. The same sort of sequence happened over and over, and apparently would have gone on forever only stopping when Miriam lost attention and stopped looking at the screen. 

Kind of cool. And in contrast to Scott McCloud's fast paced slide show of all of comics history, a bit of advertising and poster design, visual jokes, text jokes, and exegeses of a few famous comic artists' best known works, extremely limited. Science moves slowly, methodically, and haltingly. Our little trip to UCLA took most of the afternoon and was conducted out of the goodness of my heart, interest in science, and to have an activity for the day. Two undergrads took an hour or two to get us through the lab, administer a series of forms and questionnaires about Miriam's language skills, and get my parking straightened out. And as a result, they got a single data point for a study about the developmental psychology of a few English words and concepts, and that just barely as apparently Miriam only just made it in front of the screen long enough to get reliable data. Go science!

Yesterday's menu:

breakfast: cinnamon toast

lunch: bean salad and rice

dinner: pasta e fagioli

dessert: chocolate bread pudding