Brief articleSimulating an enactment effect: Pronouns guide action simulation during narrative comprehension
Introduction
Language comprehension goes beyond an understanding of the text itself and involves the mental representation of described events, known as a situation model (Johnson-Laird, 1983, van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983, Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998). These multidimensional models contain information regarding characters, goals, locations, time, actions, objects, emotions, expectations, and causality (Ditman et al., 2008, Graesser et al., 2003, Magliano et al., 2005, Rapp and Gerrig, 2006, Rapp et al., 2006, Rapp and Taylor, 2004, Zwaan, 1999, Zwaan et al., 1995, Zwaan et al., 1998). A growing body of work has also demonstrated that readers embody, or mentally simulate, described events and actions. For instance, readers are faster at identifying pictures that are congruent rather than incongruent with events described in a narrative (Fincher-Kiefer, 2001, Richardson et al., 2003, Stanfield and Zwaan, 2001, Yaxley and Zwaan, 2007, Zwaan et al., 2002, Zwaan and Yaxley, 2003), and at making responses that are congruent rather than incongruent with implied motoric sequences (Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002, Tucker and Ellis, 2004). In addition, readers use linguistic cues to determine which character’s perspective to take during these mental simulations (Black et al., 1979, Brunyé et al., 2009, Brunyé and Taylor, 2008, Ruby and Decety, 2001). Although these findings provide convincing evidence that readers are able to create vivid mental simulations of described events and actions, less clear is whether these simulations occur in the absence of experimental tasks that promote mental imagery (cf., Machery, 2007). The present experiments sought to address whether the mental simulations formed during reading occur spontaneously without the influence of task demands.
Most relevant to the present paper, Brunyé et al. (2009) recently employed a picture verification task to examine the qualitative perspectives characterizing mental simulations. In their study, readers read narratives containing simple action statements that were preceded either by a first-person pronoun (e.g., I am slicing the tomato), a second-person pronoun (e.g., You are slicing the tomato), or a third-person pronoun (e.g., He is slicing the tomato). Participants then saw a picture and indicated whether the action depicted in the picture matched the action described in the narrative. Pictures either depicted the action from an observer’s perspective or an actor’s perspective. Results demonstrated that readers appear to mentally simulate the performance of described actions from the actor’s perspective when they are directly addressed as the performer (e.g., You are slicing the tomato), and otherwise simulate from an observer’s perspective (e.g., He is slicing the tomato, or I am slicing the tomato; Brunyé et al., 2009).
Although the authors concluded that readers spontaneously use linguistic cues during language comprehension to guide mental simulations, it is possible that the results of Brunyé et al. (2009) were merely the result of the task itself rather than of mental simulations that occur naturally and spontaneously during reading. Specifically, exposing participants to action-related pictures following each trial may have promoted mental simulation during reading. Further, viewing these images from different perspectives may have promoted participants to adopt perspectives differentially as a function of pronominal cues. Thus, ideally to test mental simulations during language comprehension, one must choose a task that does not encourage participants to envision the described objects or events.
To this end, the present studies examined the resulting memory representations after participants read a set of action statements. Previous research has demonstrated that the richer the perceptual and motoric information contained within mental representations of described actions, the stronger the resulting memory traces (i.e., the enactment effect; Engelkamp, 1998, Nilsson, 2000, Nilsson and Cohen, 1988, Nyberg and Nilsson, 1995, Zimmer et al., 2001). Thus, as theories of embodied language comprehension posit that mental simulations overlap largely with those invoked during direct perception and action (cf. Barsalou, 2005, Barsalou, 2008, Fischer and Zwaan, 2008, Glenberg, 2007), then one would predict that performing first-person mental simulations of described events during reading (i.e., mentally simulating actions from an actor’s perspective) would result in the development of situation models that are particularly amenable to memory retention; such a result would be analogous to an ‘enactment effect’ (e.g., Engelkamp, 1998). This should be especially true relative to memories for actions that are mentally simulated from an observer’s perspective (e.g., statements preceded by ‘He’ or ‘I’).
Section snippets
Experiment 1
Our first experiment examined whether recognition memory for object–action relationships would be better after participants read discourse scenarios that in a previous study (Brunyé et al., 2009) promoted mental simulations from an actor’s, rather than an observer’s, perspective. Participants read three-sentence scenarios in which a final sentence described an action that was either preceded by the pronoun ‘You’, ‘He’, or ‘I’. Ten minutes later they completed a recognition test that probed for
Participants and design
Thirty-six native English speaking, right-handed Tufts University undergraduates (18 male; age M = 19.11) participated. We manipulated the pronoun preceding the action statement (Description Pronoun: I, You, He), and tested its influence on a yes/no recognition test.
Discourse scenarios
Twenty-four three-sentence discourse scenarios were adopted from earlier work (Brunyé et al., 2009; see Appendix A). The first sentence conveyed descriptive character information (e.g., I am a 22-year old deli employee), the second
Results
We examined recognition sensitivity (d′) and response times to Hits for action and descriptive items, by both subjects (F1, t1) and items (F2, t2). We also examined the relative false alarm rates across the three Description Pronouns and the two critical lure types. Table 1 details sensitivity, response times, and false alarm rates.
Discussion
Our first experiment found better retention, in the form of higher sensitivity and faster response times, when action statements were preceded by “You”. Critically, these results were only found when examining memory for actions rather than descriptive information, and were observed using a task that did not encourage participants to mentally simulate described actions. We propose that the rich mental simulations performed when readers are addressed as an actor rather than observer encode
Experiment 2
Our second experiment examined whether the above results would persist over a 3-day retention interval.
Participants and design
Thirty-six native English speaking, right-handed Tufts University undergraduates (18 male; age M = 18.83) participated for monetary compensation. The design matched that of Experiment 1.
Materials and procedure
The materials and procedure matched those of Experiment 1 with the exception of the retention interval between study and test, which was extended to 3 days.
Results
Table 1 details sensitivity, response times, and false alarm rates.
Discussion
The present results replicated Experiment 1, demonstrating that readers mentally simulated action statements from different perspectives even when the task did not encourage such simulation. Specifically, results showed better retention of action, but not descriptive, information when participants were directly addressed as an actor during reading; these effects persisted over a 3-day interval.
General discussion
Recent research has demonstrated that language comprehension activates internal modal simulations that allow readers to fully understand the perceptual and motor characteristics of described events (Barsalou, 2008, Fischer and Zwaan, 2008, Glenberg, 1997, Glenberg, 2007), although the extent to which this occurs without task demands has been unclear (cf., Machery, 2007). This process has often been described as automatic and tacit, and involving the reactivation of (at least) the visual and
Acknowledgements
We thank Aaron Gardony and William Shirer for their assistance with data collection.
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These authors contributed equally to this work.