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Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction
Abstract
Understanding literary character is a dynamic process in which the reader's knowledge structures and cognitive and emotional strategies continually interact with textual information. Dynamic effects of reading, such as inferencing or the formation and rejection of hypotheses, can only be described adequately if this interplay between top-down and bottom-up processing of information is examined. From these two sources of information, readers construct mental models not only of fictional situations, time, and space, but also of characters. Throughout the reading process, readers elaborate, modify, or revise character models to incorporate incoming information. A cognitive theory of literary character not only provides a systematic account of the constituent elements of character-reception from both text-related and reader-related sources, but it also proposes a process model that tries to capture the most important distinctive phases of mental-model construction in character-reception. The cognitive approach offers new categories for the analysis of literary character.
... This person schema serves as a foundation on which people can understand characters by updating it to reflect information about the traits of specific characters, such as physical characteristics, social roles, character types, and other information. Like Gerrig (2010), we will explore how memory-based processes allow viewers to construct mental models of characters that are dynamic, reflecting the way that characters change over time, including the processes of categorization and individuation (Schneider 2001). For serialized TV, which provides rich sensory information, some of this representation may include surface-level details (e.g., an image of Dolores' dress), but mental representations of characters in general will also consist of schematic information (Dixon and Bortolussi 2018), with an emphasis on dispositions and motivation (Schneider 2001). ...
... Like Gerrig (2010), we will explore how memory-based processes allow viewers to construct mental models of characters that are dynamic, reflecting the way that characters change over time, including the processes of categorization and individuation (Schneider 2001). For serialized TV, which provides rich sensory information, some of this representation may include surface-level details (e.g., an image of Dolores' dress), but mental representations of characters in general will also consist of schematic information (Dixon and Bortolussi 2018), with an emphasis on dispositions and motivation (Schneider 2001). ...
... Additionally, viewers learn more about Dolores as an individual, such as that she paints for a hobby. Viewers' character model of Dolores will include both category information (i.e., information about hosts) and individual information (Schneider 2001). ...
: In this chapter, we draw on research from cognitive psychology to explore how people understand the rich storyworlds that are the hallmark of serialized TV. We begin by discussing how people comprehend narratives across different mediums media by constructing mental models. Next, we provide an overview of cognitive processes that contribute to mental model construction. We then illustrate how these processes play out at multiple levels, from comprehending scenes to seasons, by analyzing the first season of Westworld, which has a multi-layered plot spanning many locations, timelines, and characters set within a richly developed world that displays the complexity of serialized television. We will also draw connections between concepts from cognitive psychology and the literature on serialized television. This analysis will also allow us to expand upon current psychological approaches to comprehension, which have focused at the level of events, to discuss how viewers comprehend the world in which the events occur.
... In the last few decades, various additional media-specific theories of characters have also been developed. We now have theories for literary characters (see, e.g., Schneider 2001;Jannidis 2004;Frow 2014), film and TV characters ( Tomasi 1988;Smith 1995;Eder 2008), comic book characters (Mikkonen 2017, 174-200;Varis 2019;D'Arcy 2020, 57-92), and video game characters (Vella 2015;Blom 2019;Schröter 2021). Often, these approaches developed independently from each other, although many aspects of characters -for instance, that media will usually grant some access to their "inner life" -are transmedial, that is: They apply across media. ...
... How is a text communicating a character by offering cues that we can draw inferences from? Literary scholar Ralf Schneider (2001), for instance, developed a complex, empirically informed model of cognitive character comprehension that outlines in great detail how readers are able to construct characters as imaginary, autonomous agents within a story. The resulting mental models seem at least partly accessible by public discussions about these characters and their meanings. ...
Transmedia Character Studies provides a range of methodological tools and foundational vocabulary for the analysis of characters across and between various forms of multimodal, interactive, and even non-narrative or non-fictional media.
This highly innovative work offers new perspectives on how to interrelate production discourses, media texts, and reception discourses, and how to select a suitable research corpus for the discussion of characters whose serial appearances stretch across years, decades, or even centuries. Each chapter starts from a different notion of how fictional characters can be considered, tracing character theories and models to approach character representations from perspectives developed in various disciplines and fields.
This book will enable graduate students and scholars of transmedia studies, film, television, comics studies, video game studies, popular culture studies, fandom studies, narratology, and creative industries to conduct comprehensive, media-conscious analyses of characters across a variety of media.
... In the last few decades, various additional media-specific theories of characters have also been developed. We now have theories for literary characters (see, e.g., Schneider 2001;Jannidis 2004;Frow 2014), film and TV characters ( Tomasi 1988;Smith 1995;Eder 2008), comic book characters (Mikkonen 2017, 174-200;Varis 2019;D'Arcy 2020, 57-92), and video game characters (Vella 2015;Blom 2019;Schröter 2021). Often, these approaches developed independently from each other, although many aspects of characters -for instance, that media will usually grant some access to their "inner life" -are transmedial, that is: They apply across media. ...
... How is a text communicating a character by offering cues that we can draw inferences from? Literary scholar Ralf Schneider (2001), for instance, developed a complex, empirically informed model of cognitive character comprehension that outlines in great detail how readers are able to construct characters as imaginary, autonomous agents within a story. The resulting mental models seem at least partly accessible by public discussions about these characters and their meanings. ...
... Drawing on the mental model theory of fictional characters (Schneider, 2001) applied to audio description (Fresno, 2016), this paper examines the audio description (AD) of characters in English and Spanish for the Netflix series Élite. The study is based on the premise that semantic descriptions of characters, rather than merely visual descriptions of physical traits, contribute to a better understanding of the narrative complexities of a film, favour AD users' memory, and reduce cognitive effort . ...
... The theoretical framework on which this work is based is the mental model theory of literary characters proposed by Schneider (2001) and applied to the AD of characters by Fresno (2016). According to this theory, "literary characters are conceived as mental models that readers construe in the reading process through a combination of information from textual and mental sources" (Schneider, 2001, p. 608). ...
Drawing on the mental model theory of fictional characters (Schneider, 2001) applied to audio description (Fresno, 2016), this paper examines the audio description (AD) of characters in English and Spanish for the Netflix series Élite. The study is based on the premise that semantic descriptions of characters, rather than merely visual descriptions of physical traits, contribute to a better understanding of the narrative complexities of a film, favour AD users’ memory, and reduce cognitive effort (Fresno et al., 2016). This contrastive analysis shows how pertinent description of action movements and appearances together with lexical accuracy can trigger helpful semantic meanings that reveal characters’ psychological features. Because Élite is a thriller in which the majority of the characters are murder suspects, accessing all types of information about them is essential to fully understand the plot. In addition, this analysis indicates that the English AD emphasizes certain character attributes which are absent from the Spanish AD, a distinction that influences the semantic domains, filmic cohesion and coherence of the narrative. This finding underscores the fact that cross-linguistic and cultural differences actually affect the reception of a fictional character by AD users (Orero, 2008; Mazur & Chmiel, 2012) and consequently, their appreciation and enjoyment of the program in question. Lay summary This paper examines the audio description (AD) of characters in English and Spanish for the Netflix series Élite. Based on previous studies (Fresno, 2014; Fresno, 2016), this analysis shows that not only physical traits, but also the description of action movements and looks can trigger helpful semantic inferences that reveal crucial characters’ psychological features. Because Élite is a thriller in which most of the characters are murder suspects, grasping all types of information about them is essential to fully understand the plot. In addition, this paper indicates that the English AD emphasizes certain character attributes which are absent in the Spanish AD. This finding underscores the fact that cross-linguistic and cultural differences actually affect the reception of a fictional character by AD users (Orero, 2008; Mazur & Chmiel, 2012) and consequently, their appreciation and enjoyment of the show in question.
... In both cases, narrative engagement may result in player perceptions that the avatar (as a persona) holds values shaped through prior experiences. As those perceived values serve as the ground for interpreting emerging gameplay situations (see Schneider, 2001), players may come to feel kinship and self-similarity with an avatar as they jointly experience those events through a shared lens (see Banks, 2015). Tenets of disposition theory (Zillmann & Cantor, 1972; see Vorderer, Klimmt, & Bryant, this volume) are critical here, given that as players recognize the values held by their avatar, they also begin to form affective dispositions toward the avatar (see Konijn & Hoorn, 2017). ...
This handbook provides a strong collection of communication- and psychology-based theories and models on media entertainment, which can be used as a knowledge resource for any academic and applied purpose. Its 41 chapters offer explanations of entertainment that audiences find in any kind of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, from classic novels to VR video games, from fictional stories to mediated sports. As becomes clear in this handbook, the history of entertainment research teaches us not to forget that even if a field is converging to a seemingly dominant perspective, paradigm, and methodology, there are more views, alternative approaches, and different yet equally illuminative ways of thinking about the field. Young scholars may find here innovative ways to reconcile empirical-theoretical approaches to the experience of entertainment with such alternative views. And there are numerous entertainment-related phenomena in contemporary societies that still fit the „bread and circuses-“ perspective of the initial Frankfurt School thinking. So while the mission of the present handbook is to compile and advance current theories about media entertainment, scholars active or interested in the topic are invited to also consider the historic roots of the field and the great diversity it has featured over the past nearly 100 years. Many lessons can be learned from this history, and future innovations in entertainment theory may just as likely emerge from refining those approaches compiled in the present handbook as from building on neglected, forgotten, or marginalized streams of scholarship.
... Every literary genre has a specific language structure and thought process that appeals to different audiences. According to Schneider (2001), when a literature student experiences literary genres, it has a direct influence not just on his or her writing style, but also on his or her thought process. He thinks and writes very differently than students in other social science and science fields. ...
... The concept of mental model (Schneider, 2001) pertains to a distinct and specialised category of cognitive representation that distinguishes itself from other forms of representation, including but not limited to images, propositions, or schemas (Hochpöchler et al., 2013). Mental models are intriguing constructs that are constructed based on our interpretation and comprehension of occurrences (Kanjug & Chaijaroen, 2012). ...
The present study involved an experimental inquiry wherein the researcher examined the possible impact of “textual cues” and “summarising scaffolding” on cognitive load, mental model, and learning performance. The study was conducted on a sample of 122 primary school pupils from Hyderabad, India. It commenced on 20 January 2021 and lasted till 28 October 2021. Using a randomization process, the participants were allocated to one of four experimental groups (D1, D2, D3, and D4). The results of the ANOVA analysis indicate that the utilisation of textual cues had a noteworthy and favourable effect on both the learning performance and the mental model. The implementation of summarising scaffolding yielded a remarkable enhancement in the mental model. The absence of significant “interaction effects” suggests that the implementation of immersive virtual reality, accompanied by textual cues or summarising scaffolding, can be advantageous for young learners. These discoveries hold particular significance for stakeholders involved in the field of education, particularly teachers and students, and possess noteworthy ramifications for the development of efficacious immersive learning environments.
... These effects are attributed to literary fiction's "simulation" of the social world (Mar & Oatley, 2008;Zunshine, 2006). The reader is immersed in and required to navigate situations and characters that are complex, multiple, and ambiguous (Culpeper 2001;Schneider, 2001;Hakemulder 2000;Miesen, 2004). The reader's ethical, emotional, and cognitive repertoire for understanding human experience is thereby expanded. ...
... Research on fictional characters dates back to Aristotle, who used the term prattō n (literally: a person who acts, an agent) to refer to a/the 'character' as narrative agent in the text (Poetics, 1448a1), and ē thos (literally: a custom, a character [istic]) for 'character' as a prattō n's individual personality (Poetics, 1449b38-1450a5;Aristotle, 1995). Modern character theory has, among other topics, focused on the ontological dimensions of fictional characters (e.g., Heidbrink, 2010;Phelan, 1989), affective engagement with/cognitive responses to characters (e.g., Eder et al., 2010;Margolin, 2010;Schneider, 2001;Smith, 1995), structuralist/narratological character typologies (e.g., Forster, 1927Forster, /1969Greimas, 1966;Propp, 1928Propp, /1968Vogler, 2007), or transmedia characters (e.g., Bertetti, 2014;Richardson, 2010;Thon, 2019). Important for our purposes is that characters are seen as constellations of different character traits, combined into a coherent "bundle of differential elements" (Frow, 2014, p. 24) that composes the prattō n's ē thos. ...
Characterization refers to the process of attributing character traits to narrative entities called 'characters'. While there is a long tradition of characterization theory in literary studies, the topic has not been examined extensively in game research. Based on insights from literary, film, and game studies, this article creates a theoretical model of how 'character,' or character traits, can be attributed in video games, and offers a methodological vocabulary for further character(ization) research. First, this paper synthesizes the tradition of characterization research in literary studies. Second, it identifies three participants in video game characterization (developers, actors, and players) and introduces the concept of ergodic characterization to describe those instances in which players produce nontrivial characterization efforts. Finally, the framework itself is presented through application to various game titles, and several answers to methodological problems within game characterization analysis are suggested.
... Recall that the participatory perspective asserts that people regularly encode the types of mental contents they would encode were they genuine participants in the narrative's events. As such, the processes that fall within the research domain of social cognition should be enormously relevant to readers' narrative experiences (see, also , Schneider, 2001). I next review a pair of projects that support that relevance. ...
In this article, I use the metaphor that readers journey to narrative worlds to review research that has spanned my career. In the first section, I consider the processes that enable readers to undertake these journeys as well as the processes that allow them to participate in the narrative worlds once they have arrived. In the second section, I review research that supports claims that readers’ journeys to narrative worlds create distance from their worlds of origin. In the final section, I consider research that documents fundamental ways in which readers’ real-world beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are changed by their experiences of narrative worlds.
... While some of this understanding may come from direct experience with autonomous technologies, much of it comes indirectly from media experiences [16]. Differences in knowing what a robot is and how it functions are best understood as differences in mental models-cognitive structures representing internalizations of external phenomena [17] in which discrete impressions are represented by knowledge tokens (see [18]). Perceiving robots as having moral-patient status has been operationalized as a mental model including some knowledge that specifically represents robots' capacity to experience benefit or suffering [14]. ...
As robots are increasingly integrated into human social spheres, they will be put in situations in which they may be perceived as moral patients—the actual or possible targets of humans’ (im)moral actions by which they may realize some benefit or suffering. However, little is understood about this potential, in part due to a lack of operationalization for measuring humans’ perceptions of machine moral patiency. This paper explicates the notion of perceived moral patiency (PMP) of robots and reports the results of three studies that develop a scale for measuring robot PMP and explore its measurements with relevant social dynamics. We ultimately present an omnibus six-factor scale, with each factor capturing the extent to which people believe a robot deserves a specific kind of moral consideration as specified by moral foundations theory (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, liberty). The omnibus PMP scale’s factor structure is robust across both in-principle and in-context evaluations, and measures contextualized (local) PMP as distinct from heuristic (global) PMP.
... Marilynn Brewer's (1988) dual-process theory of impression formation influenced Gerrig and Allbritton's (1990) work on literary character, considered from the perspective of cognitive psychology. And this work in turn influenced that of Ralf Schneider (2001), who incorporated ideas from mental models/situation models theory into his account of literary character. Schneider's conclusion (2001: 610) that "readers of novels focus their attention predominantly on psychological traits, emotions, and aims of characters that are more abstract and less dependent on the immediate circumstantial conditions of individual situations" is clearly consistent with the claims made this paper. ...
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.
... Katz ve Braly (1933, 1935'in araştırmaları stereotip araştırmalarının başlangıcı olarak gösterilmektedir. Yazarlar nitelik listesi metodu ile yürüttükleri araştırmalarında bir grubun tipik karakteristiğini ortaya çıkarmışlardır (Aktaran Yapıcı, 2004;Schneider, 2001;Banaji, 2001;Harlak, 2000). Katz ve Braly (1933)'nin Princeton üniversitesi öğrencileri ile yaptıkları araştırmada söz konusu grupların üyeleriyle çok az ya da hiç kişisel deneyime sahip olmayan katılımcıların bile on etnik/sosyal gruba belirli tanımlayıcılar atamaya oldukça istekli olduğu ve alınan kararlarda büyük ölçüde stereotiplerin etkisinin olduğu bulunmuştur (Aktaran Smith ve Griffith, 1980: 644). ...
Araştırma, sosyal psikoloji alanında uzun zamandır tartışılan stereotip kavramının yönetim alanında yapılan araştırmalardaki yerini açıklamayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, stereotip kavramının tanımı yapıldıktan sonra, kavramın tarihsel gelişim sürecinden, kuramsal alt yapısından, kavramı ölçme yöntemlerinden bahsedilerek yönetim literatüründeki yeriyle ilgili genel bir değerlendirme yapılacaktır. Stereotiplerin karmaşık dünyanın mantıklı bir şekilde okunmasına olanak tanıyan aygıtlar olarak görülmesi, insan ilişkilerinde temel bir vazifesinin olması konunun yönetim alanında da tartışılmaya başlanmasının haklı gerekçesi olduğu savunulabilir. İnsan ilişkilerinin yoğun bir şekilde yaşandığı işletmelerde, yönetim araştırmalarında sıklıkla vurgu yapılan kavramların (memnuniyet, güven, bağlılık, tükenmişlik, çatışma vb.) temelinde stereotiplerin yer aldığı ve işletmelerde sosyal etkileşimin pürüzsüz ve kolay bir şekilde ilerlemesine yardımcı olarak sosyal açıdan pragmatik bir işleve sahip oldukları düşünülmektedir. Araştırma sonucunda, stereotip kavramına dikkat çekilerek yönetim literatüründe yeni tartışmalar yapılabilmesi için farkındalık oluşturulması beklenmektedir. İşletme yöneticileri için çalışanlarının bilişsel yapılarını anlamalarına ve bu bilişsel yapıların davranışlara ve dolayısıyla iş ilişkilerine nasıl yansıdığını görmelerine olanak sağlayacaktır.
... That narrative structure is plot-driven means that the causal and chronological concatenation of events, included in a tension between the beginning and the closure, moves the entire story. Other studies, albeit acknowledging the role of the plot, have instead emphasized that the prime constituent of narrative is the character's experience (e.g., Bietti et al. 2019;Brown et al. 2019;Fludernik 1996;Schneider 2001;Tu and Brown 2020). In Fludernik's (1996) "radical" proposal, a basic narrative can be even reduced to the notion of character. ...
This event-related potentials (ERPs) study investigated online processes of integration of information relating to characters in narrative comprehension. The final sample included twenty-nine participants who read short third-person stories in which the plausibility of the characters' actions was manipulated. Stories were administered in three conditions: a character-based congruent condition including a target word that was consistent with the character's job; a character-based incongruent condition with a target word inconsistent with the character's job; a character-based neutral condition, narrating the action of a character presented by his/her proper name without information about his/her job. Results comparing the ERPs elicited by the experimental conditions revealed a greater negative amplitude of the N400 in the right temporal regions in response to the character-based incongruent compared to the character-based congruent narratives. This finding shows that implicit background character-based information affects the N400, with readers rapidly using this information to comprehend narratives.
... Overall, we interpret these findings to suggest that discrete materialities may matter little in player-character connections. Instead, it is possible that playercharacter connections are held experiences in which identification and interaction emerge as players engage with the character as a concept rather than from specific manifestations of that concept (in line with Mar & Oatley, 2008); the character is held as a mental model combining existing knowledge of the person and emerging knowledge produced through gameplay (Schneider, 2001). Rather than the character's materiality influencing the player-character connection, then, it may be that those with the strongest connections to character concepts are driven to make the character manifest in rich, multimodal ways that support personal gameplay goals-both inside the game and outside, through paratexts (mixed-medium artifacts contributing to gaming culture; Consalvo, 2007)-and to draw on modal affordances, adhere to social norms, and facilitate cooperative storytelling (see Ip & Cooperstock, 2011). ...
Despite the increasing convergence of digital, physical, and immaterial dimensions of game characters, little attention has been paid to the role of materiality in how gamers connect with the characters they play. This study evaluated potential differences in character identification and interaction in a gaming context affording various character materialities: the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Multimethod analysis of online survey data (N ¼ 1,135) reveals that character identification and interaction dimensions were invariant across primary character-representation mode (figurine, physical image, digital image, written, and imagined); however, post-hoc analysis suggests that multimaterial assemblages and social factors are key in how character representations are linked to character relations. Following, we argue that game characters may be more appropriately understood as subjective experiences rather than varying according to a given digital or physical manifestation.
... Ketika mengkonstruksi model mental karakter ada dua model utama yang diaktifkan dalam dinamika proses resepsi karakter (Schneider 2001;Gerrig dan Allbritton;1990 Setelah mengetahui bagaimana alur proses resepsi penggemar terhadap karakter, peneliti kemudian meneliti seberapa dalamnya kelekatan penggemar dengan karakter favorit mereka dengan teori struktur simpati dari Smith. Struktur simpati memiliki tiga tingkat keterlibatan yakni recognition (pengakuan), alignment (keselarasan), dan allegiance (kesetiaan). ...
Salah satu komponen penting dalam sebuah film atau serial animasi selain dari cerita adalah karakter. Karakter utama sebagai penggerak plot pada umumnya menjadi titik fokus dan seringkali menjadi karakter favorit dari penggemar. Dalam beberapa serial tidak jarang ditemukan adanya penggemar yang lebih menyukai karakter pendamping. Mengapa hal tersebut dapat terjadi? Belum banyak penelitian mengenai topik resepsi penggemar terhadap karakter dan topik ini sangat menarik dan penting untuk dipelajari. Masalah resepsi dalam pemahaman karakter dapat dipahami dengan pendekatan naratologi kognitif dengan teori ‘kategorisasi dan personalisasi’ oleh Schneider. Struktur simpati dari Murray Smith juga digunakan untuk secara lebih jauh melihat tingkat keterikatan penggemar dengan karakter favorit mereka. Penelitian ini akan berfokus pada karakter-karakter dari serial anime shounen yang memiliki karakter pendamping yang lebih populer dibandingkan dengan karakter utama. Dari penelitian ini, teridentifikasi enam kategori dalam resepsi penggemar yaitu kepribadian, perkembangan karakter, tujuan, desain/audio-video, jalinan hubungan antar karakter dan emosi. Penggemar yang secara berkelanjutan mengevaluasi tindakan yang dilakukan oleh karakter dan seberapa dalamnya mereka memahami emosi dan hubungan antar karakter akan berpengaruh pada rasa keterikatan penggemar dengan karakter.
... CASA; Nass et al. 1994) and often care for them as they serve meaning-making functions (Turkle 2007). More interestingly, perhaps, this finding aligns with social-simulationist perspectives on media characters, contending that a function (perhaps the primary function) of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social worlds (Mar and Oatley 2008), facilitated by a holding of characters as mental models (Schneider 2001). Notably, this position accounts for a range of identification mechanism strengths and combinations, from the more functional Object relations (with lower scores for all six identification mechanisms) to the more social relations (with various combinations and degrees of identification mechanisms). ...
The connection between player and avatar is central to digital gaming, with identification assumed to be core to this connection. Often, scholarship engages single dimensions of identification, yet emerging perspectives reveal that identification is polythetic (PID) – comprising at least six sufficient (but not necessary) mechanisms. The current study investigates the intersections of polythetic identification mechanisms and two different approaches to player–avatar sociality (as a marker of differentiation): general types of player–avatar relationships (PARs) and discrete dimensions of player–avatar interaction (PAX). Secondary analysis of an existing dataset of gamers revealed two main findings: (1) players reported overall diminished identification when they engaged in non-social relations with their avatar, and (2) increased liking and perspective-taking were most likely with human-like social relations, which require differentiation from rather than identification as the avatar. These findings are interpreted to suggest that player–avatar identification and differentiation are conceptually independent relational phenomena that are experientially convergent – some relational orientations and dynamics are associated with distinct combinations of identification mechanisms.
... Every literary genre has a different structure of language and pattern of thoughts which appeals to the audience in a different manner. When a student of literature encounters literary genres, it directly affects not only his/her writing style but thought pattern as well as Schneider (2001). He thinks and writes quite differently as compared to the students of other disciplines of social sciences and sciences. ...
Writing is often regarded as the most intricate skill to acquire when learning a second or foreign language. From effective use of vocabulary to every grammatical concern, writing skill is assessed on all cohesion, coherence, fluency, and accuracy scales. Thus, students often face many problems including the usage of sentence connectors. The current study, experimental in nature, explores and resolves the challenges undergraduate students encounter while
practicing the usage of sentence connectors in their writing. The study follows the tenets of the scaffolding language learning approach advocated by Vygotsky (1978). The participants of the
study are 25 in number having 19 males and 6 females. Being quantitative research, the study comparatively measures the performance of the learners in pre and post-test activities. The
results of the post-test reveal that students’ performance improved concerning the use of connectors in creating effective sentences. The findings of the study strengthen the fact that if appropriate scaffolds are provided, the learners can use English more effectively concerning their writing skills. The study suggests that instructions through the scaffolding technique can assist the learners in grasping the functional use of connectors in writing.
... The construction of a storyworld or the "art of world-making" (Monaci, 2017(Monaci, , p. 2848 or "world-building" (Hickson, 2019) is paramount for fictional narratives. Readers, viewers, or listeners need to be able to grasp and picture the characters' surroundings and the unfolding events; the characters' personalities, attitudes, identities and relationships to each other must fit the storyworld logic of their surroundings (Schneider, 2001). Fictional accounts therefore often include descriptions of the setting characters' find themselves in, as demonstrated above, to draw audiences into the characters' experiences (Zheng, 2014;Strick et al, 2015). ...
The past decade has seen an increase in research on narratives in extremist communication and their role in radicalization processes as well as on both counter- and alternative narratives as tools to prevent or counter radicalization processes. Conspicuously absent from the P/CVE literature so far, however, is a discussion on fictional narratives and the potential of stories not based on ‘realistic’ presentations of life. This article is an exploratory contribution to the discourse suggesting how fictional narratives, low in external realism but eliciting a high degree of transportation and identification in audiences, may be useful tools for P/CVE campaigns built on narratives and storytelling. It discusses the importance of transportation, identification, and perceived realism for narrative persuasion as well as the possibility to use fictional utopian narratives in P/CVE campaigns.
... Katz ve Braly (1933, 1935'in araştırmaları stereotip araştırmalarının başlangıcı olarak gösterilmektedir. Yazarlar nitelik listesi metodu ile yürüttükleri araştırmalarında bir grubun tipik karakteristiğini ortaya çıkarmışlardır (Aktaran Yapıcı, 2004;Schneider, 2001;Banaji, 2001;Harlak, 2000). Katz ve Braly (1933)'nin Princeton üniversitesi öğrencileri ile yaptıkları araştırmada söz konusu grupların üyeleriyle çok az ya da hiç kişisel deneyime sahip olmayan katılımcıların bile on etnik/sosyal gruba belirli tanımlayıcılar atamaya oldukça istekli olduğu ve alınan kararlarda büyük ölçüde stereotiplerin etkisinin olduğu bulunmuştur (Aktaran Smith ve Griffith, 1980: 644). ...
Araştırma, sosyal psikoloji alanında uzun zamandır tartışılan stereotip kavramının yönetim alanında yapılan araştırmalardaki yerini açıklamayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, stereotip kavramının tanımı yapıldıktan sonra, kavramın tarihsel gelişim sürecinden, kuramsal alt yapısından, kavramı ölçme yöntemlerinden bahsedilerek yönetim literatüründeki yeriyle ilgili genel bir değerlendirme yapılacaktır. Stereotiplerin karmaşık dünyanın mantıklı bir şekilde okunmasına olanak tanıyan aygıtlar olarak görülmesi, insan ilişkilerinde temel bir vazifesinin olması konunun yönetim alanında da tartışılmaya başlanmasının haklı gerekçesi olduğu savunulabilir. İnsan ilişkilerinin yoğun bir şekilde yaşandığı işletmelerde, yönetim araştırmalarında sıklıkla vurgu yapılan kavramların (memnuniyet, güven, bağlılık, tükenmişlik, çatışma vb.) temelinde stereotiplerin yer aldığı ve işletmelerde sosyal etkileşimin pürüzsüz ve kolay bir şekilde ilerlemesine yardımcı olarak sosyal açıdan pragmatik bir işleve sahip oldukları düşünülmektedir. Araştırma sonucunda, stereotip kavramına dikkat çekilerek yönetim literatüründe yeni tartışmalar yapılabilmesi için farkındalık oluşturulması beklenmektedir. İşletme yöneticileri için çalışanlarının bilişsel yapılarını anlamalarına ve bu bilişsel yapıların davranışlara ve dolayısıyla iş ilişkilerine nasıl yansıdığını görmelerine olanak sağlayacaktır.
... These cognitive operations entail constructing a mental representation or model of the problem [43]. Within problem-solving activities, a mental model is a holistic representation of the problem-solver experiences that serves as an operational guideline [41]. The problem space is the potential knowledge or information available to the solver at a given time to compose the holistic mental model. ...
Construction professionals require to use problem-solving skills to resolve issues on projects. However, there are limited opportunities for students to practice problem-solving skills within real-world contexts. This research explored the use of iVisit-360-degree panoramic site visits supported by virtual humans for learning problem-solving skills within difficult-to-reach construction locations. This study aimed to understand the effects of iVisit on student problem-solving skills learning using a comparative evaluation that contrasted paper-based and iVisit-based interventions. Study findings indicate that iVisit effectiveness varied depending on the methodological requirements of each situated activity. iVisit was found to significantly increase the student development of problem-solving skills during activities that require direct observation of site material properties and their spatial relationships. However, no significant differences were detected for enhancing student understanding of abstract knowledge and its relationship with site assemblies. It was also found that students with higher spatial visualization abilities performed better in problem-solving activities.
... This assumption is based on theories regarding the creation of the character's mental models. A number of theoretical endeavors have suggested that when people read or watch a narrative, they form mental models of the narrative's characters (e.g., Eder, 2010;Schneider, 2001). These "mental models are multi-modal representations. ...
The current study examines the effect of the valence of information provided about an actor on viewers’ identification with the character played by that actor and enjoyment of watching the film. The results from an experiment we conducted demonstrate that the valence of information about an actor influences identification with the character through the mediation of perceptions about the character’s traits and through transportation into the narrative. Information about the actor also indirectly affects the enjoyment of watching the film. We discuss these effects using the concepts of mental models, priming, and the fundamental attribution error as well as transportation theory.
... La relación entre capacidades cognitivas, el comportamiento atribuible a estados mentales en el mundo del relato y en el mundo exterior al relato, se mantiene en la representación de modelos mentales de los personajes (cf . Schneider 2001;Sanford & Emmott 2010). Ello lleva implícito que, a su vez, en la recepción de textos narrativos, los presupuestos de los que parten los lectores, así como sus capacidades cognitivas, determinarán en cierta medida el output. Los análisis empíricos realizados por Bortolussi y Dixon (2003, 141) respecto a la recepción de textos narrativos ...
El aporte investiga, en el contexto de la novela gráfica "Nieve en los bolsillos" (Kim), la narración visual, como fenómeno que hunde sus raíces en procesos cognitivos básicos y aparece en textos codificados de manera medialmente diversa, constituye una forma particular de organización discursiva que une aspectos del conocimiento lingüístico y extralingüístico presentes en el aula. Esta característica la vuelve particularmente útil para el proceso de aprendizaje de una lengua (L2, lengua extranjera), dado que las lenguas segundas y extranjeras parten de una base cognitiva ya adquirida tanto a nivel lingüístico como sociocultural. El conocimiento previo de carácter universal permite la comprensión de actividades básicas como atribuir una intención a una acción o a una aseveración. Dicha realización se configura de manera subjetiva en relación con las condiciones de la comunicación en general y de la comprensión textual que se encuentran en el centro de la didáctica de las lenguas extranjeras.
... Also, the same article mentioned that when adjectives are attributed to characters of the story, the participants tends to relate the actions of the characters to be consistent with their attributes (Rapp, Gerrig& Prentice, 2001). This shows that readers make inferences in the story that make them stick to a notion (Schneider, 2001). This may be due to the fact that readers make different kinds of inferences according to Graesser, Singer and Trabasso (1994) and they are instrumental inferences, goal inferences and predictive inferences. ...
... (2013, p. 10) That is to say, narratives can be thought of as intervening into the world, in that they provide materials for future narrative building since, as we have seen, narratives become implanted into human cognition in a complex interplay with memory stores that come to bear directly on how-and what-we recall as information and thus how we orientate our actions (for a review, see Herman, 2013; those accessed here directly include Herman, 1997;Jahn, 1997;Mandler, 1984;Palmer, 2004;Schank & Abelson, 1977;Werth, 1999). By way of example, think about what comes to mind if you were to hear from a narrator that a terrorist attack has occurred in New York and caused many casualties; experiential repertories, stored in the form of scripts, would allow you to "fill in the blanks" and assume that in all likelihood a white, right-wing assailant has bombed the city. 1 This is because, just as humans bring to bear prior knowledge about characters in a story from our social and literary experiences (Schneider, 2001), there is no reason why we would not do the same in real life as we encounter different "characters" in world politics. ...
Narrative research is a trending topic in international studies, with a growing body of literature adopting limited insights from narratology, sociolinguistics, and related fields to construct new insights into the workings of international relations. These studies are mainly concerned with questions about how narratives can be used to shape future policy courses, or how they impact the identity of agents and actors. The proliferation of studies using “narratives” in international studies research has been widespread since the 2000s, following a series of puzzles raised by scholars writing on language and discourse more broadly, ever since the late 1980s as part of the “linguistic turn” in the field. The adoption of narrative theory into international relations research presents a series of important questions about the methodological implications of taking narratives seriously. These include inquiries into the extent to which scholars see themselves as contributing to current social, political, and economic configurations of the world through their own work. Other questions motivated by this include: can international relations scholarship contribute to narrative theories of their own, or are they content in borrowing insights from other disciplines? How far should scholars engage in assessing what actors say, rather than what they do? Or is this distinction a false one to begin with? Are there more or less potent narratives, and why do some become prominent while others do not? What is the causal significance of narratives, and what is the best way to study them? --- END--
Article contents: Introduction / The Broader “Linguistic Turn” in International Studies / Narratology / Narrative and Cognition / The Use of Narrative Concepts in International Studies Research / Critical Approaches and Interdisciplinarity / Using Narratives in a Simpler Sense / Narratives and the Role of the Scholar
The main purpose of this article is to identify the narrative devices of transgression of the different Possible Worlds (PWs) that constitute the science fiction novel Nicolas Eymerich, inquisitore by Valerio Evangelisti, applying the apperception theory on fantastic linkages. In this work, the construction of the PW 1 of present space-time is founded on concrete theoretical and applicative developments of specific physical theories already drawn up our Actual World (AW), materializing in the PW 2 of future space-time, with narrative and ontological repercussions also on the PW 3 of past space-time. Through the cognitive perspective of apperception theory and the text analytic schema, we can highlight the mechanisms of horizontal hyperlepsis of diegetic elements involving the distinct paradigmatic anomalies of PW 3 and the final transgressive alteration between PW 2 and PW 3 .
We propose in this article an updated definition of paralepsis as a metaleptic tool as unexpected information that concerns not only an anomaly of focalization of fictional discourse (Genette 1972) but an ontological transgression of narrative levels, demarcating the scope of two potential categories, both with two subtypes (vertical top-down and bottom-up paralepsis; horizontal internal and external paralepsis). We seek in this way to move beyond Genette's primordial definition and the meager studies of subsequent decades in light of the work of cognitive narratology on the hermeneutic processes operative in narrative experience and of fantastic linkages in apperception theory (Remorini 2023). We also apply the implications of these definitions to the analysis of Michele Mari's short stories "Josef K." and "Lamento del guerriero" (featured in the 2002 short story collection Fantasmagonia).
Este trabajo parte de la constatación de un doble inconveniente en torno al uso del término “Bildungsroman”. Por un lado, que ninguna de las obras tradicionalmente consideradas Bildungsromane encaja realmente en la concepción de una integración armoniosa del individuo a la sociedad. Por otro, que es una etiqueta que, en las últimas décadas, parece aplicar a casi cualquier producto cultural que tenga como protagonista a un adolescente. Aquí se buscará superar estas dos posiciones extremas delimitando lo que preferimos llamar sistema Bildungs/Anti-Bildungsroman respecto del macrogénero más abarcador de la novela evolutiva. El supuesto para hacerlo es que en el primer caso se activa una competencia genérica propia de un lector más especializado y que esto es lo que le permite al receptor ligar la obra dada con su hipotexto, el Wilhelm Meister de J. W. Goethe. Esta dependencia de una obra fundacional, que solo un determinado tipo de receptor está en condiciones de reconocer, es elevada así, junto con la premisa de la historicidad y “alemanidad” del “sistema”, a criterio central.
Within the field of narrative empathy studies, the concept of “negative empathy,” meaning a sharing of emotions with morally negative characters, has become increasingly discussed. Through the examination of The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith, this article contributes new insights into narratological and stylistic devices eliciting readers’ empathy. This study analyses responses from expert and non-expert readers to understand how they conceptualise empathy and qualify their engagement with the novel’s eponymous character. I argue that the novel’s figural narration, which involves extensive displays of the character’s mind and silencing the narrator’s moral guidance, invites empathy. Finally, I suggest that Highsmith manipulates her readers through three related stylistic techniques (free indirect discourse, stylistic contagion and equivocal sentences), which blur the lines between the third-person narration and the character’s inner discourse. By insidiously presenting the hero’s behaviour as sensible and justified, Highsmith persuades readers to become not only witnesses but accomplices to Ripley’s crimes.
In this chapter, we turn our attention to the characters that populate fictional texts. We outline different approaches to understanding fictional characters, their ontological status and the processes by which they are created. We introduce (Culpeper, Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts, Longman, London, 2001) work on characterisation, which treats the process as an interplay between language, cognition and knowledge about the real world and its people. We go on to discuss the factors that combine to form impressions of character before going on to demonstrate how the characterisation process works by applying a revised version of (Culpeper, Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts, Longman, London, 2001) model to an extract from a novel. We show how corpus approaches can be used to examine character by investigating keywords in Shaw’s Pygmalion.
This paper has the dual purpose of outlining the case history related to paralepsis in literary texts, highlighting the different possibilities of application and the narrative effects that derive in any case towards a transgressive fantastic alteration, and of trying to update the referential system drawn by Genette in 1972. For that, we will draw on some postulates and principles of linguistics and cognitive narratology, applying them to two specific stories by Michele Mari, Josef K. and Lamento del guerriero, when we will show how unexpected information offered by a particular character (bottom-up vertical paralepsis and internal horizontal paralepsis) produce metaleptic shifts that dislocate and relocate the reading around different attractors that transgress the fictional logic (Remorini 2023).
The taxonomies of narratology have proven valuable tools for the analysis of ancient literature, but, since they were mostly forged in the analysis of modern novels, they have also occluded the distinct quality of ancient narrative and its understanding in antiquity. Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory paves the way for a new approach to ancient narrative that investigates its specific logic. Jonas Grethlein's sophisticated discussion of a wide range of literary texts in conjunction with works of criticism sheds new light on such central issues as fictionality, voice, Theory of Mind and narrative motivation. The book provides classicists with an introduction to ancient views of narrative but is also a major contribution to a historically sensitive theory of narrative.
Narrative has been the subject of theoretical reflection and empirical investigation since Aristotle’s Poetics. However, with the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing a real narrative turn in the humanities and social sciences. This volume aims to provide an overview of recent developments in the theoretical analysis of narrative, offering the reader a series of contributions that are organized along the following three theoretical-disciplinary axes: theories of narrative at the intersection of cognitive, evolutionary, and computational approaches; narrative theory and cognitive neuroscience; and narrative and storytelling as socio-communicative phenomena.
[ https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-09206-0 ]
This chapter examines the issue of “how” our predecessors began to tell stories by inventing a new expressive system. A first step in this direction concerns considering, in addition to the role of the functional conditions, the role of the structural conditions underlying communication. To this aim, a cognitive approach to the origin of language is adopted, by investigating the cognitive systems which our ancestors may have employed to process the narrative plan, i.e., the cognitive systems comprising a narrative brain. The specific focus of this chapter is on the social brain which, in a pragmatic perspective, is often considered as the unique prerequisite for language functioning and evolution. Although of great relevance, it is claimed that referring solely to the social brain does not allow to account for narrative skills in a comprehensive way.KeywordsMindreadingSocial brainLanguage-first hypothesisNarrative-first hypothesisGlobal coherence
Choice-based interactive storytelling games such as Academical, our responsible conduct of research training game, show great promise as a novel way of providing efficacious ethics training. However, much work remains to determine what factors of such games contribute to their advantages over traditional text-based training tools, especially if we hope to further improve their enjoyment, engagement and efficacy. In this article, we present a case study exploring how the motivational factors of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) underlie players’ perceived most and least enjoyable experiences arising from the design of Academical. Specifically, we discuss how certain elements of Academical’s design influence different SDT factors and subsequently player experience, as well as how such elements can be changed to further improve the game. Furthermore, our work highlights potential limitations of existing conceptualizations for the relatedness factor of SDT—discussing ways that it can be extended to properly understand player enjoyment within single-player educational interactive narrative games.
Textual Encounters: Reading Character in the Nineteenth-Century Novel explores how readers experience fictional character in ways that reflect the textual nature of real social encounters, and examines how that experience is facilitated by formal features of the realist novel. By considering how formal elements of the novel—including free-indirect discourse, omniscient narrative voice, first-person narrative, unreliable narration, and epistolarity—can mimic and exploit the incompleteness that occurs in real social encounters, this dissertation makes the claim that experiencing characters as real persons is not an accidental or problematic side effect of reading realist fiction, but instead a natural result of our phenomenological experience in the real world and an effect cultivated by the novel’s formal choices. Through readings of key novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and Anthony Trollope, Textual Encounters examines how the realist novel explores, both formally and thematically, the possibilities and limitations of reading others as texts. Part I focuses on third-person narratives and argues that that nineteenth-century novels formally exploit cognitive mechanisms, like theory of mind and cognitive framing, in order to naturalize readers’ encounters with fictional characters. Chapter I offers a reading of Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, suggesting characters in these novels practice strategies of omniscience and free-indirect discourse to navigate the gaps inherent to social encounters. By emphasizing the epistemological similarities between encounters with real and fictional others, these novels posit omniscience and free indirect discourse not as strange, fictional activities but a natural part of social experience. Chapter II’s reading of Middlemarch builds upon the discussion of incompleteness in Chapter I by exploring the function of cognitive frames in Eliot’s characterization and their connection to her aesthetic and sympathetic project. Middlemarch highlights a fluidity between real and fictional social experience, suggesting both a cognitive basis for imagining characters as persons and an avenue for integrating fictional encounters into readers’ understandings of reality. While Part I of this dissertation focuses on the techniques of third-person omniscient narration, Part II highlights the ontological ambivalence of two specific first-person forms, the fictional autobiography and epistolarity. Chapter III examines two fictional autobiographies by Brontë, Jane Eyre and Villette, suggesting that fictional first-person novels rely on the reader’s capacity for constructing others through narrative as well as their familiarity with the conventions of non-fictional life writing. These novels point to the self as inherently constructed and fictional, and emphasizes the reader’s role in producing textually-constructed selves. Finally, Chapter IV examines letter exchanges in Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now, which serve to highlight one literal way real persons can be encountered as texts. Trollope’s use of letters collapses the interpretive position of intra- and extratextual reader in ways that highlight the shared fictionality of real and literary representation.
This article discusses the literary character's plot function as an element of the author's rhetorical strategy, and in relation to the reader's active role in responding to that strategy. The main focus will be on characterological instances in narrative fiction that facilitate the development of the novel's plot by way of the character's movement, perspective, or moving perspective. These considerations will be brought to bear on James Phelan's rhetorical approach to the fictional character's basic functions, also known as the mimetic-thematic-synthetic model (MTS model). More precisely, this article will look harder at Phelan's so-called synthetic component of character, that is, those aspects that foreground the character as a construct (rather than as a possible person or a theme), to argue that much more work can be done with this category. In the course of this discussion, Henry James's notion of a ficelle and Vladimir Nabokov's term perry will serve as complementary ideas and as a counterpoint to Phelan's synthetic component. Hence this article will ask: how can we (re)integrate the plot-helper function into the rhetorical character theory?
The study attempts decoding Dr. Lecter's mind style by examining and
then applying cognitive metaphor theory revealing, thus, through a stylistic analysis of the criminal mind of the protagonist how far the use of metaphors
contributes to the linguistic projection of his criminal and disturbed mind exposing, thus, the way he thinks, argues and perceives reality. Top-down and bottom-up processes, attribution theory, humanizing and de-humanizing approaches, empathy and anti-empathy are also employed due to their major importance in revealing uncertainty, mystery and suspense in character reception. The study of the cognitive of mystery and crime fiction will also be integrated to suggest more interpretations in the process of character reception.
This article re-evaluates the theoretical import of networks of signification, one of Antoine Berman’s twelve deforming tendencies in translation. Taking Jane Eyre as a case study, the article considers character description as an example of a Bermanian network and traces the physical appearance of the novel’s characters across its six Russian translations. Character description represents a network that is traceable, depends on the reader’s ability to construct a visual mental image over the course of a narrative, has a tangible impact on characterisation, and remains relevant throughout a novel. It thus offers a concrete illustration of the relevance of networks of signification as a model for the systemic interpretative potential of translation variation. This analysis paves the way for further study of Bermanian networks and the ultimate integration of this concept in translation practice.
This article addresses the contributions by Michael Whitenton, and Bonnie Howe and Eve Sweetser, in the present volume. I endorse all three contributors’ use of cognitive-linguistic approaches, highlighting their helpfulness for the reconstruction of frames that shape the reading experience of audiences located in different historical and cultural contexts. The two chapters meticulously trace the complexity and dynamics of understanding exemplary biblical characters. I emphasise that the level of attention to linguistic detail displayed by cognitive stylistics is a desideratum for a reader-oriented analysis of a text’s potential reading effects. At the same time, I question some assumptions in cognitive linguistics concerning the cognitive-emotional processes real readers are actually likely to perform. The two chapters serve as a starting point for me to discuss general tendencies in recent cognitive and empirical literary studies, which have perhaps overstated the intensity and impact of some processes, while overlooking others that may be just as important.
Mascot characters are a fascinating case for the study of transmedial characters. They are playfully (re)presented to possess agency themselves, that is, on the same ontological plane their audience finds themselves in. Visitors of theme parks are intended to imagine themselves as part of the same world that mascots live in. This world is, not accidentally, exactly similar to ›our‹ world with one major difference: within that possible world, the corporate icons are not merely mascots, but actual intentional beings to which we attribute autonomy and personal agency. We, as visitors, exist there as well, as do all our performative interactions with mascots. While a description in representational terms is possible, this article is offering other theoretical options that are perhaps more suitable to expose the rhetoric behind the ›imaginary agency‹ of mascot characters. I want to apply a few related perspectives of Actor-Network-Theory and other proponents of the so-called ›new materialisms‹ on mascot characters and their agential relations. As virtual actors, they function as hubs that ›black-box‹ the complex interrelations of semiotic and material affordances, as well as the distribution of authorial and economic agency ›between‹ the countless personal and corporate actors involved.
In this thesis, I attempt to trace the threads that links the theoretical concept of narrative to the museum blockbuster exhibition. I adopt a qualitative dialogic approach, exploring the topic of narrative from the perspective of both exhibition makers and museum visitors. Semi-structured interviews with museum professionals provide an insight into the strategies and practices involved in the encoding of narrative in museum exhibitions. Interviews with members of the public reveal how visitors decode exhibition narratives, while also illustrating the role museums play in the stories people tell about themselves. Narrative is a term that is often used in reference to museums but is frequently under-theorised. My case studies – three blockbuster exhibitions held at the British Museum from 2013 to 2015 – each approach the question of how is narrative as a concept relevant in helping us understand the critical issue of the museum from different perspectives. Drawing on the work of the Roland Barthes and the Mikhail Bakhtin, I investigate how concepts taken from literary theory such as plot structure and narratorial perspective might manifests themselves in the space of a museum exhibition. Using the concept of cultural capital taken from the work of the French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I also explore the role a visitor’s social background and familiarity with museums plays in their decision to follow a narrative or reject it. Two threads run throughout my thesis. One is the use of the term narrative to describe the multimodal, multi-authored nature of museum-making. The other is the role museums play in the construction of narratives about the past. It is in the dialogue between the two narrative threads that this thesis seeks to explore and untangle.
Resumen: Este artículo repasa primero las principales contribuciones teóricas al tema del personaje narrativo. Presenta luego una nueva propuesta teórica distinguiendo dos papeles (actantes / actores) y facetas (individuos / tipos) dentro de la categoría del personaje y en relación con los tres estratos del texto narrativo (fábula-función, trama-acción y relatodiscurso). Por último, esta propuesta teórica es verificada mediante el análisis del funcionamiento de tales papeles y facetas en los personajes narrativos de Tirano Banderas de Valle-Inclán.Abstract: This article first reviews the main theoretical contributions to the subject of the narrative character. It then presents a new theoretical proposal that differentiates two roles (actants / actors) and facets (individuals / types) within the category of character in relation to the three levels of the narrative text (story-function, plot-action and narrative discourse). Finally, this theoretical proposal is subsequently verified trough the analysis of the functioning of the narrative characters in Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas.
The article presents a model-oriented approach to how third-person narratives are read. Building on Minsky's (1979 [1975]) theory of frames, Jackendoff's (1983; 1987) concept of preference rules, Perry's (1979) theory of literary dynamics, and Sternberg's (1982b) Proteus Principle, its main aim is to conceptualize third-person narrative situations (Stanzel 1984) in terms of cognitive models, and to explore the mechanics of top-down/bottom-up hermeneutic processes. Avoiding classical "low-structuralist" narratology with its "normal case" approach, the essay also proposes new ways of analyzing protean phenomena like description, free indirect discourse, and parenthetical discourse. It presents an integrative account of primacy/recency conflicts and sketches the possible direction of a genuinely reading-oriented narratology.
Scientific aesthetics offers an organized approach to the study of processes involved in the creation and appreciation of aesthetic objects. The experimental approach to aesthetics can be traced back to Gustav Fechner (1801–1889) and the founding of general experimental psychology. Fechner's ‘psychometric’ approach focused on the effects of isolated stimulus properties on viewer's preference responses. Daniel Berlyne (1924–1976) added conceptual and methodological sophistication to Fechner's approach. Berlyne was behavioural in his orientation, treating aesthetic activity as a kind of intrinsically motivated form of exploration. His notion of ‘collative’ stimulus properties provided a means of quantifying the complexity and orderliness of stimulus structure. The central finding of this approach is that viewers prefer moderate levels of aesthetic complexity, relative to their own aesthetic sophistication. This line of research has been criticized for its narrow emphasis on quantification and lack of sensitivity to the cognitive processes involved in appreciating the meaning of aesthetic objects. A resolution of this ‘crisis’ is proposed which stresses: reflection on assumptions underlying the Fechner-Berlyne approach; in-depth observation of phenomena in the lived-world; and interdisciplinary communication.
Presents a critique of contemporary research which uses the notion of a mental image as a theoretical construct to describe 1 form of memory representation. It is argued that an adequate characterization of "what one knows" requires the use of abstract mental structures to which there is no conscious access and which are essentially conceptual and propositional, rather than sensory or pictorial, in nature. Such representations are more accurately referred to as symbolic descriptions than as images in the usual sense. Implications of using an imagery vocabulary are examined, and it is argued that the picture metaphor underlying recent theoretical discussions is seriously misleading, especially as it suggests that the image is an entity to be perceived. The relative merits of several alternative modes of representation (propositions, data structures, and procedures) are discussed. A more speculative discussion of the nature of the representation which may be involved when people "use" visual images is also presented. (65 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A review of the literature on implicit personality theory reveals that there has been considerable concentration on various techniques for measuring the theory. While such measures do have considerable overlap they also vary in a variety of ways. The major theoretical questions have involved personality correlates of individual implicit personality theory, relationship of the theory to linguistic structure, and whether it reflects the actual distribution of traits in other people. Questions are raised about whether traits are the most appropriate units of person cognition and whether perceivers see traits as distributed across situations as well as stimulus persons. (91 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Readers of stories construct mental models of the situation and characters described. They infer causal connections relating characters' actions to their goals. They also focus attention on characters' movements, thereby activating nearby parts of the mental model. This activation is revealed in readers' faster answering of questions about such parts, with less facilitation the greater their distance from the focus. Recently visited as well as imagined locations are also activated for several seconds. These patterns of temporary activation facilitate comprehension.
In contrast to expectation-based, predictive views of discourse comprehension, a model is developed in which the initial processing is strictly bottom-up. Word meanings are activated, propositions are formed, and inferences and elaborations are produced without regard to the discourse context. However, a network of interrelated items is created in this manner, which can be integrated into a coherent structure through a spreading activation process. Data concerning the time course of word identification in a discourse context are examined. A simulation of arithmetic word-problem understanding provides a plausible account for some well-known phenomena in this area.
This research investigated literary expertise by examining how literary experts and students in English Literature describe a complex narrative conveyed by character dialouge. Performance protocols obtained in this task, were analyzed using a model of text description based on a stratified theory of discourse processing. The model identifies semantic units in subjects' text description protocols that consist of a set of possible ‘discursive patterns’. Each discursive pattern includes a text unit being described, and a point of reference for the description, that is, a reader, author, or text perspective. Analysis of subjects' discursive patterns indicated that students closely paraphrased the text, recounting either narrative events or characters' speech, while experts relied on specific text information to support more inferential statements. Experts commented more extensively on the language used in the text, and their descriptions included references to narrative structure and functions of dialogue in the text as well as references to the author, the reader and the relationship between author and reader. Experts appear to view the text as the result of deliberate linguistic and conceptual choices made by an author, and awareness of these choices appears to have guided their descriptions of specific text structures.
The concept of a ‘schema’ as a theoretical construct has regained prominence among memory researchers, particularly those studying prose learning. A schema is a cluster of knowledge that describes the typical properties of the concept it represents. Recent theories built upon the notion of schemata have explained numerous results in human comprehension, recall, and summarization of prose. While schema theory provides a plausible and descriptive framework for understanding human knowledge processing, it is ill-constrained and provides few detailed process assumptions. This lack of constraint allows sufficient flexibility to accommodate post hoc many empirical results. However, because of this flexibility, the theory is of limited predictive value and is not testable as a scientific theory in its current form. We detail the strengths and weaknesses of schema theory, affirm its promise as a theory of human memory, and suggest areas for future theoretical development.
Aspects of understanding that predominate once a situation has been assigned a complete semantic representation, and that representation has been overlearned, are discussed. These aspects tend to be experiential, qualitative, and evaluative. It is argued that schema or frame theories are incapable in principle of accounting for understanding activities in this mode. It is suggested that educational emphasis on the mechanical phase of comprehension with corresponding devaluation of experiential understanding could have adverse effects on the development of conceptual vitality, with a resultant retardation of creative thought.
A primary property of mental models is that they represent what the text is about (the events, objects, and processes described in the text), rather than features of the text itself. We used this property to demonstrate that mental models are operative during text comprehension. Subjects read texts that were propositionally equivalent, but described events in which the main actor was either spatially associated with a target object or spatially dissociated from the object. Pronominal reference kept the actor foregrounded throughout the text, but the target object was never repeated. The question of interest was whether the target object remained foregrounded when the text described events in which the actor and the object were spatially associated. Data from experiments using item recognition and reading time measures provided an affirmative answer. Thus the mental model controlling foregrounding reflected the structure of the events described by the text, not just the structure of the text.
The notion that stylistic features of literary texts deautomatize perception is central to a tradition of literary theory from Coleridge through Shklovsky and Mukařovský to Van Peer. Stylistic variations, known as foregrounding, hypothetically prompt defamiliarization, evoke feelings, and prolong reading time. These possibilities were tested in four studies in which segment by segment reading times and ratings were collected from readers of a short story. In each study, foregrounded segments of the story were associated with increased reading times, greater strikingness ratings, and greater affect ratings. Response to foregrounding appeared to be independent of literary competence or experience. Reasons for considering readers' response to foregrounding as a distinctive aspect of interaction with literary texts are discussed.
Literary narratives are primarily about people, their experiences, behaviour and goals, and about relationships between people. Recent studies in social cognition have suggested that affect is the primary medium in which social episodes and information about the self are represented. It is argued that theories of text processing that adopt an information processing model are overlooking a key component in how we respond to narrative. The affective modes by which we understand people and ourselves may direct the information processing aspects of story response. An affect-based model of literary narrative is outlined in this paper, in which it is argued that three properties of affect are implicated in story understanding: self-reference, anticipation, and domain-crossing. By their means, affect plays a constructive role in guiding response to ambiguities and conflicts at the level of schemata. Two empirical studies are reported which provide support for the model.
Listeners generally attempt to understand oral conversational stories by figuring out what the narrator is ‘getting at’; their understanding is point-driven in this sense. Analogously, a form of reading in which readers expect to be able to impute motives to authors may also be called point-driven; it is a mode that seems especially useful for reading so-called ‘literary’ texts. Point-driven reading is conceptually distinguishable from story-driven and information-driven types. We argue that each type is asociated with a number of cognitive strategies, with point-driven reading, specifically, characterized by coherence, narrative surface, and transactional strategies. Using a modern short story, we illustrate how point-driven readings might be differentiated from other kinds. An advantage of this conceptualization is that it enables one to generate empirically testable hypotheses about literary reading; we suggest a number of such hypotheses and methods of testing them.
In a series of experiments we investigated the nature of mental representations created during narrative comprehension. Subjects learned the layout of a research center and then read a series of stories about characters performing various tasks in the center. Accessibility of information was measured by periodically interrupting the narratives with a pair of object names (object probes) or a protagonist name and an object name (protagonist probes). The subjects′ task was to indicate whether the probed items were in the same room or in different rooms of the learned layout. The results indicated that the presence of protagonist probes was necessary for the construction of detailed situation models (e.g., Bower & Morrow, 1990; Morrow, Bower, & Greenspan, 1989; Morrow, Greenspan. & Bower, 1987). Therefore, it is important to consider task demands and reader goals when investigating the structure and the content of mental representations created during narrative comprehension.
These experiments investigate people's knowledge of routine activities (e.g., eating in a restaurant, visiting a dentist) and how that knowledge is organized and used to understand and remember narrative texts. We use the term script to refer to these action stereotypes. Two studies collected script norms: people described what goes on in detail during familiar activities. They largely agreed on the nature of the characters, props, actions, and the order of the actions. They also agreed on how to segment the low-level action sequences into constituent “scenes,” suggesting a hierarchical organization in memory of the activity. Other studies investigated memory for a text narrating actions from a script. Subjects tended to confuse in memory actions that were stated with unstated actions implied by the script. This tendency increased as more related script instances were studied. Subjects also preferred to recall script actions in their familiar order; a scrambled text that presented some script actions out of order tended to be recalled in canonical order. We also investigated whether the reading time for adjacent statements in a text varied with their distance apart in the underlying script. A statement at a one-step distance was read faster than one at a two- or three-step distance; statements in the second half of a script were read faster than those in the first half. A final experiment found that goal-relevant deviations from a script were remembered better than script actions. The role of script knowledge in text memory was discussed, as was the relation of scripts to schema memory in general.
To account for the large demands on working memory during text comprehension and expert performance, the traditional models of working memory involving temporary storage must be extended to include working memory based on storage in long-term memory. In the proposed theoretical framework cognitive processes are viewed as a sequence of stable states representing end products of processing. In skilled activities, acquired memory skills allow these end products to be stored in long-term memory and kept directly accessible by means of retrieval cues in short-term memory, as proposed by skilled memory theory. These theoretical claims are supported by a review of evidence on memory in text comprehension and expert performance in such domains as mental calculation, medical diagnosis, and chess.
The narratives studied by schema-based models or story grammars are generally simpler than those found in literary texts, such as short stories or novels. Literary narratives are indeterminate, exhibiting conflicts between schemata and frequent ambiguities in the status of narrative elements. An account of the process of comprehending such complex narratives is beyond the reach of purely cognitive models. It is argued that during comprehension response is controlled by affect, which directs the creation of schemata more adequate to the text. Several properties of affect that make it appropriate for this model of narrative are discussed. A short story by Virginia Woolf is analysed in the light of the proposed model. A study with readers of this story is described, which illustrates the process of schema formation: Shifts in the relative importance of story phrases across the reading and the comments made by readers point to a process of schema creation under the control of affect. It is argued that affect may play a more productive role in cognitive processes than is generally acknowledged.