The effects of segmentation on the recall of theatrical material

Abstract

This study explores how actors and students differ when asked to segment the same text. Previous research (Noice and Noice 1992) has indicated that actors, when preparing a role, divide the script into units called beats. To investigate the role this organizational device plays during learning, actors and students were presented with the same scene from a theatrical script. They were given explicit procedural instructions on how to segment the scene. Both groups were required to label their divisions. Actors created far more divisions, resulting in smaller beats and significantly more of those beats described goal-directed activities from the viewpoint of the assigned character. Students, on the other hand, seemed to stand outside the situation and describe the scene as a static state of affairs. The actors' approach to segmenting a script appeared to consist of inferring the causal relations between the events in the play, resulting in better recall of the temporal order. Previous research (Noice, in press) showed that students who studied a theatrical script as if it were a school assignment retained as much material verbatim as actors did. However, in the present study in which both groups were given this script division task, actors' verbatim retention was significantly higher than that of students.