Literature and event understanding

Abstract

We believe that the scientific study of narrative comprehension will move from using short, laboratory-contrived “textoids” to longer, naturalistic narratives. This move is being driven by technological developments and by theoretical interest in event comprehension mechanisms in reading. One mechanism in which we have been particularly interested is event segmentation, which is the spontaneous organization of incoming information into meaningful discrete events. Behavioral and neurophysiological studies suggest that similar principles govern event segmentation in reading and in the perception of movies and live action. Some of these studies contribute to a growing body of evidence that readers mentally simulate events as they read, including some of their perceptual and motor properties. Based on these trends we look forward to a scientific study of narrative comprehension that is increasingly integrated with broad general theories of perception and memory.