Modelling Inference in the Comprehension of Cinematic Narratives

Abstract

The viewer’s processes of inference making in the cinema involve the framing of hypotheses about the world of the narrative that may be overturned by subsequent information and are, therefore, nonmonotonic. The goal of narrative researchers is to understand the nature of those processes and how texts organise the deployment of those processes in order to present a narrative successfully. To do this we need methods capable of describing processes of hypothesis framing and belief revision. In this paper, I describe the application of the Transferable Belief Model to a hypothetical example of narrative comprehension based on an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as one such method.