Young and older adults were presented with pictures for study. Their recognition of the information was tested at five retention intervals: immediately, and 48 hr, 1 week, 2 weeks, and 4 weeks later. The main finding of interest was that picture recognition did not show an age-related decline until the 1-week retention interval.

Comics are a composite text made up of words and images that, taken together, can have an impact far different from that produced by more traditional modes of narrative such as the short story or the novel. Much like film, comics rely on a visual language that encourages a more immediate processing time within the reader and, on the level of interpretation, a more "efficient" exchange between author(s) and audience-at least when compared to purely language-based mediums. This is not to suggest that comics are a more passive means of narrative (as many of its detractors have historically argued), nor does it assume any lack of ambiguity of intent or indeterminacy of meaning in graphic narrative. The images that serve as referential icons fall prey to the same kind of semantic slippage found in linguistic codes (which themselves, in the form of letters and words, also function as icons of meaning). Nonetheless, there is something relatively "direct" about an image's ability to affect reader response. The figures that make up the comics rub up against reality in ways that words cannot, revealing the various assumptions, predispositions, and prejudices that author-illustrators may hold. This power underlying the comic image becomes all the more evident when placed within the context of race and ethnicity. As legendary writer/illustrator Will Eisner points out, comics are a heavily coded medium that rely on stereotyping as a way to concentrate narrative effectiveness. He argues that unlike film, where characters have more time to develop, graphic narrative, with its relatively limited temporal space, must condense identity

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Although published as a “graphic novel,” Will Eisner’s A Contract with God could more accurately be called a “graphic cycle” in that its narrative structure is based on four short interconnected stories, all linked by the common setting of a 1930s Bronx tenement house. In this way, the text shares more similarities with the short-story cycle than it does with the traditional novel. Through his composite structuring, Eisner links his Dropsie Avenue stories in such a way that the meaning of each individual story is largely contingent upon that of the others in the text. Furthermore, the ambiguous genre distinction of Eisner’s text—neither a novel nor a collection of disparate stories—parallels a more fluid understanding of American ethnic identity, where no one means of expression in isolation can stand as “essentially” Jewish. By creating a “graphic novel” that is not really novelistic, Eisner sequentially sketches Jewish American identity by juxtaposing diverse yet interlinked representations of Jewishness.

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