Children’s Picturebook Goes Digital: Implications on Cognition

Abstract

The objects of analysis in this article are digital picturebooks, which may be called e-picturebooks. This research contributes to a definition of e-picturebook as a distinct storytelling experience from printed picturebook, introducing distributed cognition as a new theoretical perspective for the analysis of the phenomenon. This perspective emphasizes cognitive systems related to specific features of this category of digital book. In this sense, picturebook and e-picturebook are defined as cognitive artifacts that constrain storytelling tasks very differently from each other, not only because of their constitutive features but also because of the cognitive systems involved in the understanding of stories in each medium.

Keywords

• picturebook
• book-app
• storytelling
• distributed cognition
• cognitive artifacts