Readers’ Responses When Characters Act on Completed Goals: Impact of Characters’ Mental States and Readers’ Task Focus

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that readers track the objective status of characters' goals (i.e., whether the goals have been completed). We suggest that readers also use characters' subjective representations—characters' mental states with respect to goals—to comprehend actions. We explored circumstances in which local information about characters' subjective representation of a goal mismatched global information about the goal's objective status. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that reading times were always affected by local information about characters' subjective representations but were unaffected by global information about objective goal status. In Experiments 3a and 3b, we asked participants to make judgments about characters' actions. We found that readers' judgments were affected both by global information about goal completion and by characters' subjective representations. These studies provide evidence that readers attend to characters' subjective representations of their goals and that different tasks affect whether readers focus on local or global information.