Characters and their perspectives in narratives describing spatial environments

Summary

This paper explores how people represent spatial information involving two perspectives associated with characters who share the same environment. Subjects first learned a narrative that described a scene with eight landmarks surrounding two characters who had the same or different perspective. Afterwards, subjects were given blocks of three-sentence items to be read at their own pace. The first two sentences guided the reader's attention to one character, while the third sentence described a spatial relation between a character and a landmark; subjects had to verify whether the relation was true or false. The results showed that it took longer to verify sentences after learning two-perspective narratives than it did with those of one perspective, and after reading items involving two characters rather than one. Both effects were significant and independent. To explain the perspective effect, it is proposed that subjects build a single perspective-free mental model that is instantiated as a particular perspective when necessary. The character effect has to do with modeling the characters' nonspatial traits. Finally, spatial skills were a predictor of subjects' performance, indicating individual differences in modeling efficiency.