2018_12_19_ICS_gordejuela-adriana

Adriana Gordejuela, doctoral candidate at project 'Public discourse' of the Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Navarra, has defended her doctoral thesis , entitled 'Looking to the past: a cognitive and multimodal analysis of film flashbacks'. In it, the researcher has tried to determine "the common denominator to all flashbacks in cognitive terms that allows them to be properly understood by the viewer".

For this purpose, Adriana has analyzed, on the one hand, the technical and poetic Structures of the flashback -such as shots, transitions, editing, music...- and, on the other hand, the cognitive processes that each format activates in the mind of the viewer.

The representation of a time jump "immediately activates various cognitive processes, such as the understanding of temporal relationships, the integration of points of view or identity connections between elements of different contexts," she says. In this way, the new doctor assures that the study of the cognitive mechanisms involved in the creation and comprehension of multimodal discourses allows us to better understand how human beings communicate.

Stays and international accompaniment

With a degree in Philology and a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Navarra, she later studied Master's Degree in programs of study Contemporaries. Already during her programs of study from Degree she began to be interested in the degree program researcher. "From the beginning I wanted to do something related to the 'language' of cinema and my director, Inés Olza -researcher at project 'Public discourse-, was the one who showed me a whole panorama of research that I didn't know about," she says.

In addition to Inés Olza, Adriana has counted on Francis F. Steen, professor at department of Communication at the University of California-Los Angeles (USA), as co-director of her thesis . In fact, she accompanied Steen for six months in the framework of a research stay, carried out thanks to a scholarship for Excellence of the Caja Navarra Foundation.

In addition, during the years in which he has been doing his thesis he has attended and presented papers in some international congresses in Germany, Belgium and Estonia.