Experiments on story comprehension and recall∗

Abstract

The author reviews psychological research on how people understand and remember brief stories. Understanding characters in stories and remembering their actions is alleged to use methods and rules similar to those invoked in actual person perception. We try to understand a character's actions as the manifestation of a plan to achieve some goal or satisfy some motive. One experiment showed that if the text obscures the goal and plan of the main character, college students judge it to be incoherent and they recall it poorly. In another experiment, an emotionally charged problem and motive for the character was hinted at before the subject read a set of dull, colorless episodes involving that character. Later memory tests showed that the character's alleged motive influenced the reader's interpretation of the text, directed his inferences regarding what was going on between the lines, and distorted his recall of the text. Later experiments showed that the meaning a reader derives from a story depends on the character he identifies with. After reading a story while identifying with a given character, the reader is more likely to recall thoughts of that character, to describe events from his station point, and to give a sympathetic interpretation to his actions. Thus, my character's mishaps were forced by external circumstance, whereas his adversaries’ mistakes reflected their incompetence. A final experiment showed that readers are likely to identify with that character whose emotional mood is similar to their own as they read. Subjects made happy or sad as they read via a posthypnotic suggestion identified with the happy or sad character of a story, believed he was the central focus of the story, and remembered most about him.

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