Temporal changes as event boundaries: Processing and memory consequences of narrative time shifts☆
Section snippets
Experiment 1
The first experiment used an event segmentation procedure to test the hypothesis that temporal changes in narrative text are explicitly perceived as event boundaries. In a typical event segmentation paradigm, participants watch a movie of an everyday event, and are asked to segment the activity in the movie by pressing a button when they believe one meaningful unit of activity ends and another begins (Newtson, 1973). This segmentation procedure has been shown to reliably measure perceptual
Experiment 2
In standard memory paradigms involving the retention of lists of words or digits, it is well established that greater amounts of intervening information, rather than a longer duration, between an item and its subsequent reappearance lead to a greater likelihood that the original information will be forgotten (Waugh & Norman, 1965). However, the situation model view advocated here suggests that in narrative reading, it may be that neither time nor the sheer amount of intervening information is
Experiment 3
The results of Experiment 2 establish that temporal changes in narratives can influence the ability to retrieve prior information from memory. However, the explicit recognition paradigm used in Experiment 2 and in studies by other researchers differs in many ways from the normal process of reading. To generalize the results of these studies to discourse comprehension, it is necessary to know whether temporal changes influence memory retrieval in ongoing discourse. Therefore, the current
Experiment 4
Experiment 2 established that in a direct memory test, accuracy for identifying previously presented objects is reduced following a temporal change, and Experiment 3 found that anaphoric references to those objects were slower following a temporal change. One possibility is that the slower anaphor reading times observed in Experiment 3 are the result of the reduced memory found in Experiment 2. However, an alternative possibility is that the memory accuracy and reading time effects are both
General discussion
The first goal of the current series of studies was to determine whether readers perceive temporal changes as event boundaries between consecutive episodes of activity in narrative text. The results clearly suggest that they do. Readers were more likely to perceive an event boundary at the points at which a temporal reference indicated a change in narrative time (“An hour later…”) than at any other points in the narratives. In addition, they were quite likely to identify event boundaries at
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This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to N.K.S., as well as grants from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the National Science Foundation (0236651) to J.M.Z. The authors thank Pascale Michelon, Jeremy Reynolds, Khena Swallow, and Jean Vettel for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript, as well as Mitch Dornfeld, Justin Lerner, Jennifer Scott, and Melissa Vogel for help with stimulus construction and data collection.