Who knows what? Propagation of knowledge among agents in a literary storyworld

When goals collide: Monitoring the goals of multiple characters

“…In support of this prediction, Graesser and his colleagues have shown that a narrative agent's salience in the discourse mediates the extent to which readers monitor their knowledge states (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, White, & Person, 1999) and remember their dialogue (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, & Pomeroy, 1999). Although Graesser's research is relevant to the present study and this prediction, it is important to note that they did not study character goals.…”

“…Despite the fact that most narratives contain multiple characters interacting in a story world, relatively little research has been done that assesses the extent to which understanders monitor the concerns and construct elaborate representations of multiple characters (see Graesser, Bowers, Olde, & Pomeroy, 1999;Graesser, Bowers, Olde, White, & Person, 1999;Trabasso & Nickels, 1992). Although it seems reasonable that narrative understanding and appreciation require viewers and readers to keep track of multiple characters' goals, it is also likely that working memory constraints place limitations on one's ability to do so.…”

“…However, working memory constraints most likely limit the number of characters that one can monitor in any given story (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, & Pomeroy, 1999;Graesser, Bowers, Olde, White, & Person, 1999). Several factors potentially mediate the extent to which we monitor a character's goals.…”

Psychological essentialist reasoning and perspective taking during reading: A donkey is not a zebra, but a plate can be a clock

“…Other psycholinguistic research on perspective taking tends to employ more offline measures, such as explicit judgments of a story character's knowledge (e.g., Gerrig, Brennan, & Ohaeri, 2001;Graesser, Bowers, Olde, White, & Person, 1999) or a probe recognition task following a target sentence (e.g., Albrecht, O'Brien, Mason, & Myers, 1995). In general, it has been found that readers often do not suppress their privileged information when switching perspective to an ignorant story character's perspective or when judging what this character knows.…”

The small world of shakespeare’s plays

“…Moreover, comprehension of plot is dependent on comprehension of relationship. Graesser et al (1999) have shown that the process of tracking the changing mental states of characters in a story depends on apprehending their social relationships to key protagonists. For example, if we learn that Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night hates Malvolio and wants to humiliate him, then we can infer by default that Feste, Fabian, and Aguecheek will want this too, since they form Belch's social clique.…”