Event-indexing Model Research Articles

Comprehension: from clause to conspiracy narrative

ABSTRACT In this article, I outline the evolution of my research in the domain of narrative comprehension. I cover three phases: (1) the event-indexing model, which explores connecting events in narratives; (2) the immersed experiencer framework, which focuses on event representations and mental simulations; and (3) a preliminary exploration of conspiracy thinking, in which I reveal parallels with coherence generation in narrative comprehension. I emphasize the interconnectedness of these domains and call for further investigation into the intricacies of narrative comprehension.

Opinion Piece: How People Structure Representations of Discourse

Mental models or situation models include representations of people, but much of the literature about such models focuses on the representation of eventualities (events, states, and processes) or (small-scale) situations. In the well-known event-indexing model of Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser (1995), for example, protagonists are just one of five dimensions on which situation models are indexed. They are not given any additional special status. Consideration of longer narratives, and the ways in which readers or listeners relate to them, suggest that people have a more central status in the way we think about texts, and hence in discourse representations, Indeed, such considerations suggest that discourse representations are organised around (the representations of) central characters. The paper develops the idea of the centrality of main characters in representations of longer texts, by considering, among other things, the way information is presented in novels, with L’Éducation Sentimentale by Gustav Flaubert as a case study. Conclusions are also drawn about the role of representations of people in the representation of other types of text.

Comprehension Models of Audiovisual Discourse Processing

Comprehension is integral to enjoyment of media narratives, yet our understanding of how viewers create the situation models that underlie comprehension is limited. This study utilizes two models of comprehension that had previously been tested with factual texts/videos to predict viewers' recall of entertainment media. Across five television/film clips, the landscape model explained at least 29% of the variance in recall. A dual coding version that assumed separate verbal and visual representations of the story significantly improved the model fit in four of the clips, accounting for an additional 15–29% of the variance. The dimensions of the event-indexing model (time, space, protagonist, causality, and intentionality) significantly moderated the relationship between the dual coding model and participant recall in all clips.

Narrative event boundaries, reading times, and expectation.

During text comprehension, readers create mental representations of the described events, called situation models. When new information is encountered, these models must be updated or new ones created. Consistent with the event indexing model, previous studies have shown that when readers encounter an event shift, reading times often increase. However, such increases are not consistently observed. This paper addresses this inconsistency by examining the extent to which reading-time differences observed at event shifts reflect an unexpectedness in the narrative rather than processes involved in model updating. In two reassessments of prior work, event shifts known to increase reading time were rated as less expected, and expectedness ratings significantly predicted reading time. In three new experiments, participants read stories in which an event shift was or was not foreshadowed, thereby influencing expectedness of the shift. Experiment 1 revealed that readers do not expect event shifts, but foreshadowing eliminates this. Experiment 2 showed that foreshadowing does not affect identification of event shifts. Finally, Experiment 3 found that, although reading times increased when an event shift was not foreshadowed, they were not different from controls when it was. Moreover, responses to memory probes were slower following an event shift regardless of foreshadowing, suggesting that situation model updating had taken place. Overall, the results support the idea that previously observed reading time increases at event shifts reflect, at least in part, a reader's unexpected encounter with a shift rather than an increase in processing effort required to update a situation model.

Enfoque cognitivo para la comprensión de narraciones: una mirada desde la psicología discursiva y el modelo de indexación de eventos

The following article perfoms a review of the cognive vision regarding narration. This vision claims that narration responds to internal natural processes that favors aids its development and comprehension. We analyse this vision from its begining until we focus and examine one of the comprehension models of narration that emerge from discursive psychology: the event indexing model (Zwaan, Langston & Graesser, 1995a). We finish our bibliographic investigation pointing at the benefits and challenges that this model presents not only for future research in the area, but also for the didactics of textual comprehension.

Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park.... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the 'Discourse Framing Hypothesis' according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan's Event Indexing Model.

The Representation of Causal Sequence in Expository Text Comprehension

Text comprehension is viewed as the construction of a mental representation of the situation described by the text. Based on the evidence from narrative comprehension, Zwaan et. al., (1995) have proposed an event-indexing model of text comprehension. According to the model, during comprehension, readers construct their representations from five indexes:time, space, causality, intentionality, and agent. Actually, these five indexes are corresponding to the framework of an event, and the model fits the comprehension of narrative that usually involves creating a mental representation of the states of affairs described by the text. In view of both theoretical consensus and the evidence from narrative text experiments, it is somewhat surprising that evidence for the construction and the structure of representation is not clear when comprehension of expository text is considered. There has been much less research using expository than there has been using narrative texts, and a major issue concerning these studies has been the effect of knowledge map on the processing of expository. During expository comprehension, knowledge map was more helpful for the participants who without interrelated domain knowledge than the participants who with some interrelated domain knowledge in the construction of the representation. Based on the systematic analysis of previous theories and evidences from text reprehension in the reading of narrative and expository text, it raised a question that whether the construction of text representation can be realized in expository comprehension like that in the narrative reading. This research was designed to throw some light on the question. We examine the status of construction and the structure of mental representation of expository text about familiar topics. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 was to explore whether participants construct the representation of causal sequence presented in the expository. Experiment 2 varied the order of the description to make it differ from the inherent order of the causal sequence. In Experiment 3, two causal sequences were provided. Participants read the short expository on familiar topic and finished a probe task after reading each passage. All materials were presented on a monitor controlled by computer. Participants read the passages in a self-paced manner, advancing the text one line at a time by pressing the space bar. Participants were instructed to read carefully so that they would be able to judge whether the probe word appeared in the text. The reaction times for the probe followed by the prime sentence were recorded and analyzed. The results showed that in the reading of expository on familiar topics, mental representation was constructed based on the causal relation, rather than the surface relation, the representation of the expository about a causal chain was organized with the causal order, but not affected by the descriptive order, the corresponding causal relations were grasped if the content illuminated more than one causal chain. The present findings indicate that the construction of representation of causal sequence can be realized in comprehending expository on familiar topics. Also, the evidence implied the pattern of causal representation of expository text.

Processing and Representing Temporal Information in Narrative Text

Abstract According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995 Zwaan, R. A., Langston, M. C. and Graesser, A. C. 1995. The construction of situation models in narrative comprehension: an event-indexing model. Psychological Science, 6: 292–297. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998 Zwaan, R. A. and Radvansky, G. A. 1998. Situation models in language comprehension and memory. Psychological Bulletin, 123: 162–185. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). These dimensions are time (e.g., the order of events), space (e.g., locations), protagonist (e.g., main character actions), causality (e.g., how one event influences another event), and intentionality (e.g., goals). These experiments were designed to further explore how readers process and represent time (duration) in situation-model construction. In 3 experiments, we examined how duration-related inconsistencies influenced processing time and processing strategies. Results indicate that readers routinely monitor the duration of events and detect temporal inconsistencies even when temporal information is implicitly presented. This provides evidence for the representation of duration information in situation models.

Assessing the influence of dimensional focus during situation model construction

According to Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser's (1995) event-indexing model, when comprehending text, readers monitor changes in a series of critical dimensions: space, time, protagonist, causality, and intentionality. In this study, the influence of dimensional focus was assessed during situation-model construction. Participants read narratives and were instructed to specifically monitor a single dimension while their sentence reading times were recorded. Critical sentence reading times were then analyzed for all shift types. Results support the general prediction that at least the time and protagonist dimensions are resistant to task demands, demonstrating that comprehenders routinely perform dimensional updating processes that are context independent. These results are discussed in the context of the event-indexing model.

An intelligent summarization system based on cognitive psychology

Automatic document summarization is a highly interdisciplinary research area related with computer science, multimedia, statistics, as well as cognitive psychology. In this paper, we introduce an intelligent system, the event indexing and summarization (EIS) system, for automatic document summarization, which is based on a cognitive psychology model (the event-indexing model) and the roles and importance of sentences and their syntax in document understanding. The EIS system involves syntactic analysis of sentences, clustering and indexing sentences with five indices from the event-indexing model, and extracting the most prominent content by lexical analysis at phrase and clause levels. After thorough implementation and objective evaluations, the system has shown good performance in multiple documents summarization. This system also incorporates special algorithms related with the third person pronoun resolution to extract the true entities that each sentence describes.

Implications of the mental models approach for cultivation theory

Mental models are dynamic mental representations of situations, events, and objects. We argue that the mental models approach can expand our understanding of cultivation theory. We survey the research on mental models, situation models including the event indexing model, and cultural models. Based on this literature, we propose several ways in which cultivation theory can be expanded to provide a richer understanding of how the media influence peoples perception of their social reality and understanding of their culture.

テキスト理解におけるオンライン処理メカニズム

This article reviewed research on construction of situation models during reading. To position variety of research in overall process appropriately, an unitary framework was devised in terms of three theories for on-line processing: resonance process, event-indexing model, and constructionist theory. Resonance process was treated as a basic activation mechanism in the framework. Event-indexing model was regarded as a screening system which selected and encoded activated information in situation models along with situational dimensions. Constructionist theory was considered to have a supervisory role based on coherence and explanation. From a view of the unitary framework, some problems concerning each theory were examined and possible interpretations were given. Finally, it was pointed out that there were little theoretical arguments on associative processing at global level and encoding text- and inference-information into long-term memory.

Who when where: an experimental test of the event-indexing model.

We tested the event-indexing model proposed by Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser (1995). Participants read narratives containing target sentences that involved situational shifts. Independently of each other, continuity and shifting of the protagonist, time, and location dimensions were varied. In Experiment 1, reading times of the target sentences increased for protagonist shifts and temporal shifts, whereas the effect of spatial shifts was weak. Moreover, an interaction of protagonist shifts and spatial shifts was found. These results were replicated in Experiment 2, which also revealed strong effects of these situational shifts on coherence ratings that participants gave immediately after reading each target sentence. Experiment 3 addressed the interaction of protagonist shifts and spatial shifts, showing that it may be due to the differential involvement of unexplained protagonist motions. These experimental results support the processing load predictions of the event-indexing model and extend previous correlational results.

Indexing space and time in film understanding

AbstractWe investigated the extent to which understanders monitor shifts in time and space during film comprehension. Participants viewed a feature‐length film and identified those points in the film in which they perceived a change in situation. We performed an a priori analysis of the films to identify the shifts in time, the movement of characters, and region. The relationship between the theoretical analysis of the films and the participants judgements of situational change was assessed. The results provide support for the Event Indexing Model and suggest that situation models for filmed events are indexed along multiple dimensions of situational continuity. Furthermore, the pattern of results was similar for narrative film as they are for narrative text. This finding suggest that there are general mechanisms for event understanding that operate independently of medium or mode of experience. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Vers la prise en compte de la caractéristique multidimensionnelle des représentations mentales construites à partir des textes narratifs : apports théoriques, empiriques et questions

Summary : Evidence for a multidimensional aspect of mental representations built from narrative texts : Theoretical framework, empirical contributions and issues. The main goal of this paper is to review the studies that investigated the multidimensional aspect of situational representation elaborated from narrative texts. After presenting the origins ofthe multidimensional approach, we describe two models, the « Structure Building Framework » (Gernsbacher, 1990) and the « Event Indexing Model » initially proposed by Zwaan, Langston and Graesser (1995) that underline the importance of multiple dimensions in reference with the notion of situational continuity. Then, we present empirical studies that confirm the validity ofthe theoretical principles ofthe event indexing model that account for the richness ofthe comprehension process. Finally, we raise some issues relative to the current multidimensional approach that concern, first, unanswered questions about the definition of the dimensions and their monitoring, and, second, whether the event indexing model can be applied to ail types oftext. Key words : text comprehension, multidimensional situation model, situational continuity, coherence.

Constructing Multidimensional Situation Models During Reading

We examined which dimensions of the situation model (time, space, causation, motivation, and protagonist) are monitored by readers during narrative comprehension. Clause or sentence reading times were collected in three experiments and analyzed using multiple-regression analyses. Experiment 1 showed that readers monitored temporal, causal, goal-related, and protagonist-related continuity because discontinuities on these dimensions led to reliable increases in reading times. This was not the case for spatial continuity. Prior to reading, participants in Experiment 2 memorized a map of the building in which the events described in the narratives took place. There was a reliable effect of the spatial dimension, as well as of the other dimensions. In Experiment 3, participants read the narratives of Experiment 2 but without having first memorized the map. There was no effect of the spatial dimension, but the effects were again reliable for the other dimensions. Reading times increased as a function of the number of situational continuity breaks. The results are discussed in the context of the event-indexing model (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998).

The Construction of Situation Models in Narrative Comprehension: An Event-Indexing Model

In this article, we propose and test a model of how readers construct representations of the situations described in simple narratives the event-indexing model According to the event-indexing model, events are the focal points of situations conveyed in narratives and are connected in memory along five dimensions time, space, protagonist, causality, and intentionality The results of a verb-clustering task provide strong support for the event-indexing model