Persuasive Effects of Fictional Narratives Increase Over Time

Fact-related information contained in fictional narratives may induce substantial changes in readers' real-world beliefs. Current models of persuasion through fiction assume that these effects occur because readers are psychologically transported into the fictional world of the narrative. Contrary to general dual-process models of persuasion, models of persuasion through fiction also imply that persuasive effects of fictional narratives are persistent and even increase over time (absolute sleeper effect). In an experiment designed to test this prediction, 81 participants read either a fictional story that contained true as well as false assertions about real-world topics or a control story. There were large short-term persuasive effects of false information, and these effects were even larger for a group with a 2-week assessment delay. Belief certainty was weakened immediately after reading but returned to baseline level after 2 weeks, indicating that beliefs acquired by reading fictional narratives are integrated into real-world knowledge.     

SKOOL versus ZOOL: Effects of orthographic and phonological long-term memory on nonword immediate serial recall

People can acquire both true and false knowledge about the world from fictional stories. The present study explored whether the benefits and costs of learning about the world from fictional stories extend beyond memory for directly stated pieces of information. Of interest was whether readers would use correct and incorrect story references to make deductive inferences about related information in the story, and then integrate those inferences into their knowledge bases. Participants read stories containing correct, neutral, and misleading references to facts about the world; each reference could be combined with another reference that occurred in a later sentence to make a deductive inference. Later they answered general knowledge questions that tested for these deductive inferences. The results showed that participants generated and retained the deductive inferences regardless of whether the inferences were consistent or inconsistent with world knowledge, and irrespective of whether the references were placed consecutively in the text or separated by many sentences. Readers learn more than what is directly stated in stories; they use references to the real world to make both correct and incorrect inferences that are integrated into their knowledge bases.     

Inferring facts from fiction: reading correct and incorrect information affects memory for related information

People can acquire both true and false knowledge about the world from fictional stories. The present study explored whether the benefits and costs of learning about the world from fictional stories extend beyond memory for directly stated pieces of information. Of interest was whether readers would use correct and incorrect story references to make deductive inferences about related information in the story, and then integrate those inferences into their knowledge bases. Participants read stories containing correct, neutral, and misleading references to facts about the world; each reference could be combined with another reference that occurred in a later sentence to make a deductive inference. Later they answered general knowledge questions that tested for these deductive inferences. The results showed that participants generated and retained the deductive inferences regardless of whether the inferences were consistent or inconsistent with world knowledge, and irrespective of whether the references were placed consecutively in the text or separated by many sentences. Readers learn more than what is directly stated in stories; they use references to the real world to make both correct and incorrect inferences that are integrated into their knowledge bases.     

Development of parafoveal processing within and across words in reading: Evidence from the boundary paradigm

In this study we used the boundary paradigm to examine whether readers extract more parafoveal information within than across words. More specifically, we examined whether readers extract more parafoveal information from a compound word's second constituent than from the same word when it is the noun in an adjective–noun phrase (kummitustarina “ghost story” vs. lennokas tarina “vivid story”). We also examined whether the processing of compound word constituents is serial or parallel and how parafoveal word processing develops over the elementary school years. Participants were Finnish adults and 8-year-old second-, 10-year-old fourth-, and 12-year-old sixth-graders. The results showed that for all age groups more parafoveal information is extracted from the second constituent within compounds than from the noun in adjective–noun phrases. Moreover, for all age groups we found evidence for parallel processing of constituents within compounds, but only when the compounds were of high frequency. In sum, the present study shows that attentional allocation extends further to the right and is more simultaneous when words are linguistically and spatially unified, providing evidence that attention in text processing is flexible in nature.     

Helping High School Students Read Like Experts: Affective Evaluation,Salience, and Literary Interpretation

This study explored whether a month-long instructional intervention in affective evaluation can help struggling high school readers to engage in literary interpretation in ways similar to expert readers’ practices. We compared pre- and post-intervention think-aloud protocols from five high school students as they read a literary short story with the protocols from five experienced English teachers for the same story. After the intervention, student readers attended more frequently to story details that expert readers also found salient to interpretation. Students also made interpretive moves similar to those made by experts, such as inferences about character goals, interpretation of potential symbols, and attention to patterns and juxtapositions in the text. Further, students’ focus on interpretively salient details influenced their thematic inferences. These findings suggest that the recruitment of everyday, affect-based practices can help novice readers develop more “expert-like” literary schemata and construct more meaningful interpretations of a literary text.     

Readers’ use of source information in text comprehension

In two experiments, we examined the role of discrepancy on readers’ text processing of and memory for the sources of brief news reports. Each story included two assertions that were attributed to different sources. We manipulated whether the second assertion was either discrepant or consistent with the first assertion. On the basis of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) assumption, we predicted that discrepant stories would promote deeper processing and better memory for the sources conveying the messages, as compared to consistent stories. As predicted, readers mentioned more sources in summaries of discrepant stories, recalled more sources, made more fixations, and displayed longer gaze times in source areas when reading discrepant than when reading consistent stories. In Experiment 2, we found enhanced memory for source–content links for discrepant stories even when intersentential connectors were absent, and regardless of the reading goals. Discussion was focused on discrepancies as one mechanism by which readers are prompted to encode source–content links more deeply, as a method of integrating disparate pieces of information into a coherent mental representation of a text.     

Opening the Closed Mind: The Effect of Exposure to Literature on the Need for Closure

The need for cognitive closure has been found to be associated with a variety of suboptimal information processing strategies, leading to decreased creativity and rationality. This experiment tested the hypothesis that exposure to fictional short stories, as compared with exposure to nonfictional essays, will reduce need for cognitive closure. One hundred participants were assigned to read either an essay or a short story (out of a set of 8 essays and 8 short stories matched for length, reading difficulty, and interest). After reading, their need for cognitive closure was assessed. As hypothesized, when compared to participants in the essay condition, participants in the short story condition experienced a significant decrease in self-reported need for cognitive closure. The effect was particularly strong for participants who were habitual readers (of either fiction or non-fiction). These findings suggest that reading fictional literature could lead to better procedures of processing information generally, including those of creativity.     

Verification of Statements about Story Worlds That Deviate from Normal Conceptions of Time: What Is True aboutEinstein''s Dreams?

College students read chapters from a novel written by Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) and later provided verification judgments on the truth/falsity of test statements. Each chapter described a different fictional village that incorporated assumptions about time that deviate from our normal TIME schema, e.g., citizens knowing exactly when the world will end, time flowing backward instead of forward. These novel assumptions about time provided interesting insights about life and reality. In two experiments, we examined whether readers could accurately incorporate these novel assumptions about time in the fictional story worlds, as manifested in the verification judgments for statements after story comprehension. The test statements included verbatim typical, verbatim atypical, inference typical, and inference atypical information from the perspective of mundane reality that meshes with a normal TIME schema. Verification ratings were collected on a 6-point scale in Experiment 1, whereas Experiment 2 used a signal–response technique in which binary true/false decisions were extracted at −.5, 1.5, 3.5, 5.5, and 10.0 s. The college students were measured on literary expertise, reading skill, working memory span, and reading time. Readers with comparatively high literary expertise showed truth discrimination scores that were compatible with aschema copy plus tagmodel, which assumes that readers are good at detecting and remembering atypical verbatim information; this model predicts better (and faster) truth discrimination for verbatim atypical statements than for verbatim typical statements. In contrast, fast readers with comparatively low literary expertise were compatible with afilteringmodel; this model predicts that readers gloss over (or suppress) atypical verbatim information and show advantages for verbatim typical information. All groups of readers had trouble inferentially propagating the novel assumptions about time in a fictional story world, but the slower readers were more accurate in their verification of the atypical inferences. Aconstruction–integrationmodel could explain the interactions among literary expertise, reading time, and the typicality of test statements.     

Fictional narratives change beliefs: replications of Prentice,Gerrig, and Bailis (1997) with mixed corroboration

We report three exact replications of experiments aimed at illuminating how fictional narratives influence beliefs (Prentice, Gerrig, & Bailis, 1997). Students read fictional stories that contained weak, unsupported assertions and which took place either at their home school or at an away school. Prentice et al. found that students were influenced to accept the assertions, even those blatantly false, but that this effect on beliefs was limited to the away-school setting. We questioned the limiting of the narrative effect to remote settings. Our studies consistently reproduced the first finding, heightened acceptance of statements occurring in the conversations of narrative protagonists, but we failed to reproduce the moderating effect of school location. In an attempt to understand these discrepancies, we measured likely moderating factors such as readers’ need for cognition and their extent of scrutiny of the narratives.     

Modal Fictionalism and Compositionality

Modal fictionalists propose to defuse the unwanted ontological commitments of modal realism by treating modal realism as a fictional story, and modal assertions as assertions, prefixed by a fictionalist operator, that something is true in that story. However, consideration of conditionals with modal antecedents raises the problem ofembedding, which shows that the simple prefixing strategy cannotsucceed. A compositional version of the fictionalist strategy isdeveloped and critiqued, and some general semantic morals aredrawn from the failures of both strategies.     

Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors

Readers learn errors embedded in fictional stories and use them to answer later general knowledge questions (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Suggestibility is robust and occurs even when story errors contradict well-known facts. The current study evaluated whether suggestibility is linked to participants' inability to judge story content as correct versus incorrect. Specifically, participants read stories containing correct and misleading information about the world; some information was familiar (making error discovery possible), while some was more obscure. To improve participants' monitoring ability, we highlighted (in red font) a subset of story phrases requiring evaluation; readers no longer needed to find factual information. Rather, they simply needed to evaluate its correctness. Readers were more likely to answer questions with story errors if they were highlighted in red font, even if they contradicted well-known facts. Although highlighting to-be-evaluated information freed cognitive resources for monitoring, an ironic effect occurred: Drawing attention to specific errors increased rather than decreased later suggestibility. Failure to monitor for errors, not failure to identify the information requiring evaluation, leads to suggestibility.     

Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors

Readers learn errors embedded in fictional stories and use them to answer later general knowledge questions (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Suggestibility is robust and occurs even when story errors contradict well-known facts. The current study evaluated whether suggestibility is linked to participants' inability to judge story content as correct versus incorrect. Specifically, participants read stories containing correct and misleading information about the world; some information was familiar (making error discovery possible), while some was more obscure. To improve participants' monitoring ability, we highlighted (in red font) a subset of story phrases requiring evaluation; readers no longer needed to find factual information. Rather, they simply needed to evaluate its correctness. Readers were more likely to answer questions with story errors if they were highlighted in red font, even if they contradicted well-known facts. Although highlighting to-be-evaluated information freed cognitive resources for monitoring, an ironic effect occurred: Drawing attention to specific errors increased rather than decreased later suggestibility. Failure to monitor for errors, not failure to identify the information requiring evaluation, leads to suggestibility.     

Out of sight,out of mind: Occlusion and the accessibility of information in narrative comprehension

Do readers encode the perceptual perspectives of characters during narrative comprehension? To address this question, we conducted two experiments using stories that sometimes described situations in which certain information was occluded from the protagonists’ views. We generated two related hypotheses concerning the potential impact of occlusion events on text representations. One, theevent boundary hypothesis, suggested that any salient narrative event would reduce the accessibility of prior story information. The second, theperceptual availability hypothesis, suggested that accessibility would decrease most for information no longer visible to story protagonists. In Experiment 1, the participants were slowest to respond to verification questions that asked about occluded information. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that this effect did not extend to other, nonoccluded information. These results suggest that readers encode text information from the perceptual perspective of story protagonists. This is consistent with recent perceptual symbol views of language comprehension.     

Contextual override of pragmatic anomalies: evidence from eye movements

Readers typically experience processing difficulty when they encounter a word that is anomalous within the local context, such as 'The mouse picked up the dynamite...'. The research reported here demonstrates that by placing a sentence in a fictional scenario that is already well known to the reader (e.g., a Tom and Jerry cartoon, as a context for the example sentence above), the difficulty usually associated with these pragmatic anomalies can be immediately eliminated, as reflected in participants' eye movement behaviour. This finding suggests that readers can rapidly integrate information from their common ground, specifically, their cultural knowledge, whilst interpreting incoming text, and provides further evidence that incoming words are immediately integrated within the global discourse.     

汉语阅读中的心理词加工

通过两项研究考察了汉语阅读中心理词存在的心理现实性及其加工效率问题。研究1采用词切分任务考察语法知识掌握水平不同的读者词切分的差异,发现他们在词切分上存在很大分歧,语法知识越丰富,词切分差异越小。研究2探讨心理词的加工效率,使用阴影标记目标词,产生四种呈现条件：正常条件、词汇词条件、心理词条件和非词条件,结果发现心理词比词汇词、非词更容易加工。两项研究结果表明汉语阅读的基本信息单元更可能是心理词。     

Seeing what they read and hearing what they say: Readers’ representation of the story characters’ world

Do readers “see” the words that story characters read and “hear” the words that they hear? Just as priming effects are reduced when stimuli are presented cross-modally on two different occasions, we found reduced transfer effects when story characters were described as experiencing stimuli cross-modally. In Experiment 1, a repeated phrase was described as being part of a spoken message in both Story A and Story B, and transfer effects were found. In Experiment 2, in contrast, when the phrase was described as a written note in one story and a spoken message in the other, reading-time results indicated that readers did not retrieve the meaning of the repeated phrase. The results are consistent with findings indicating that visual imagery simulates visual processing and that auditory imagery simulates auditory processing. We conclude that readers mentally simulate the perceptual details involved in story characters’ linguistic exchanges.     

Postdecisional counterfactual thinking by actors and readers

How do individuals think counterfactually about the outcomes of their decisions? Most previous studies have investigated how readers think about fictional stories, rather than how actors think about events they have actually experienced. We assumed that differences in individuals' roles (actor vs. reader) can make different information available, which in turn can affect counterfactual thinking. Hence, we predicted an effect of role on postdecisional counterfactual thinking. Reporting the results of eight studies, we show that readers undo the negative outcome of a story by undoing the protagonist's choice to tackle a given problem, rather than the protagonist's unsuccessful attempt to solve it. But actors who make the same choice and experience the same negative outcome as the protagonist undo this outcome by altering features of the problem. We also show that this effect does not depend on motivational factors. These results contradict current accounts of counterfactual thinking and demonstrate the necessity of investigating the counterfactual thoughts of individuals in varied roles.     

Persistence of Belief Change in the Face of Deception: The Effect of Factual Stories Revealed to Be False

Readers typically respond with anger and derogation when they discover that an author has engaged in intentional deception (representing a false story as true). Does this negative response to the author also cause individuals to correct beliefs that may have been changed by the discredited story? In this experiment (N = 160), the alleged truth status of a narrative was manipulated. In one condition, the narrative was presented as fictional (a socially accepted form of untruth). The remaining three conditions initially presented the story as factual. Participants in two of these conditions were informed after reading the story that it was inaccurate due to a) accidental error or b) intentional deception. The story changed attitudes from a no-story control in all conditions. Although readers derogated a deceptive author, they did not correct their attitudes even in the intentional and accidental error conditions. A measure of the parts of the story that the participants rejected (false note circling), suggests that participants were motivated to correct for inaccuracies, but were not able to do so effectively.