No abstract

The present study employed a concept comparison method to investigate the memory representation of concept interrelationships produced by reading an O. Henry short story. Readers rated all pairings of characters and locations from the story on the basis of how closely the text elements were interpreted as being connected. The interrelationships among the characters and locations were generated by multidimensional scaling. The scaling solution contained the temporal dimension of the story as well as groupings of characters and locations very similar to the groupings in the story. In the first experiment instructional set was found to affect specific interrelationships among the plot elements rather than the overall pattern. In the second experiment a 21-day retention interval produced an effect on the overall structure of the interrelationships.