Distributed attention - scanning, global processing and wide pattern seeking, most familiar when we look at a painting, watch a movie, search the web or explore a database. The eyes scan a spatial field.... select, process and orders visual data into conceptual wholes. Gestalt. Global pattern, macro to micro. But meaning is really an oscillation between focused attention and distributed attention. Focused attention is serial processing- reading. The eye moves and settles on difference, focuses an image onto the retina and then sends the data through the primary visual cortex through higher levels of abstraction - separating color, shape, symbol. While the visual data moves up the chain of abstraction, a stored database of abstractions (memory), moves down the chain to check-in at different levels. 

Distributed attention is actually quick movements between areas of focused attention. Foveal and macular vision.  Unlike the consistent focused attention required to follow the linear path of a sentence, saccadic rhythms of foveal seeing - looking at an image, for example- a moving attention,  scanning an spatial environment-- is broken into small chunks of information. that is,

The spatial montage that Manovich equates, in his art and writing, to database logic is a form of semantic collage. As soon as two distinct images appear together on a screen, mimetic realism is broken. The surface of engagement may have a kind semiotic realism—the elements may be juxtaposed in a culturally meaningful or referential way—but the illusion of representation is lost. In spatial montage, screen becomes an interface to a relational set. Like gestalt in interface design, the whole perceived in spatial montage works when a mental model can be made out of bottom-up and top-down processes of attention.

Drucker - Graphic Devices. The narrative role of everything besides the images, text, sound and video. The gutters, borders, white-space. The structures that hold together the content. 

Chris Ware's graphic novel...
In classical film narratives, mise en scene works to synchronize with plot development. The set details might mirror the psychology of a character, for example.

But a narrative film’s mise en scene, the meaningful distribution of visual details, is always threatening to distract from the more “important” and hierarchical details of plot and narrative momentum. Image has a power to spill over any kind contained meaning.

In non-classical forms of cinema, a tension or contrast builds between the visible details distributed on the screen and the plot.

Maybe the details begin to a tell a different story than the one the characters are pretending to be involved in. Or the mise en scene introduces many simultaneous narratives that compete for attention. Similarly, page layout or mise en page, can be embedded with disparate, competing information or focus attention on an hierarchy. Interface design, like production design in movies, is an art to control the way attention flows through and around elements. 

The narrative implications of this shift to the multi-paneled interface are great: new ways of representing space, subjectivity, the relationships between personas. Much of this shift can be seen in the best of contemporary graphic novels. In Shaun Tan’s, “The Arrival”, there is a double-page spread showing images of clouds. In the context of the story, the simple grid makes visible on macro and micro levels, the passage of time, the loneliness of travel, the longing for home, boredom, the change that each day brings. In fact, the associations spill over the narrative container—a man traveling by ship to a new land—as we have the leisure to think of our own experience of passing days. Compared with a single image of the protagonist sitting alone in thought, this image is not only more effective as narrative device, it presents a distributed persona; an affective-expressive identification that is not attached to a single point of view; an identity without a body.