Tracking and maintenance of goal-relevant location information in narratives

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether readers maintain location in a highly-accessible state in memory during narrative comprehension while reading narratives with goals closely tied to locations that story protagonists needed to reach. College undergraduates (n = 185, n = 100) read short, experiment-generated narratives manipulated in three ways. First, protagonist location was manipulated such that the goal was either completed or not, making subsequent critical sentences consistent or inconsistent, respectively, with the last-described location. Second, text distance between the manipulation of location and the later target sentence was varied such that the critical sentences were close to or distant from the last mention of location. Third, location words that explicitly mentioned the protagonist's location were either present or not in the critical sentences. Readers took longer to read critical sentences when the protagonist had not been described as reaching the goal location, suggesting that readers were maintaining location information in highly-accessible state. This effect emerged with or without explicit location words in the critical sentences and with near or distant backgrounding. These results are discussed in the context of scenario-based and memory-based theories of comprehension.