Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work

Conscious experience is fluid; it rarely remains on one topic for an extended period without deviation. Its dynamic nature is illustrated by the experience of mind wandering, in which attention switches from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Studies exploring the phenomenology of mind wandering highlight the importance of its content and relation to meta-cognition in determining its functional outcomes. Examination of the information-processing demands of the mind-wandering state suggests that it involves perceptual decoupling to escape the constraints of the moment, its content arises from episodic and affective processes, and its regulation relies on executive control. Mind wandering also involves a complex balance of costs and benefits: Its association with various kinds of error underlines its cost, whereas its relationship to creativity and future planning suggest its potential value. Although essential to the stream of consciousness, various strategies may minimize the downsides of mind wandering while maintaining its productive aspects.

The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness

Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

Psychonarratology is an approach to the empirical study of literary response and the processing of narrative. It draws on the empirical methodology of cognitive psychology and discourse processing as well as the theoretical insights and conceptual analysis of literary studies, particularly narratology. The present work provides a conceptual and empirical basis for this interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to researchers from either disciplinary background. An integrative review is presented of the classic problems in narratology: the status of the narrator, events and plot, characters and characterization, speech and thought, and focalization. For each area, Bortolussi and Dixon critique the state of the art in narratology and literary studies, discuss relevant work in cognitive psychology, and provide a new analytical framework based on the insight that readers treat the narrator as a conversational participant. Empirical evidence is presented on each problem, much of it previously unpublished.

Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response

https://sites.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/LiteraryReading/Readings/Dixon%20Bortolussi%20Twilley%20and%20Leung.pdf

Literary processing and interpretation: Towards empirical foundations

In much of the theoretical analyses of text processing, it is assumed that text should be thought of as a form of communication between the author and the reader. This conception is analogous to the communicative model used for analyzing conversation. We argue that this text-as-communication model is inappropriate for many forms of written discourse and for fictional narrative in particular. Unlike oral communication, the author is not physically present, the author is usually not the implied speaker of the text, and recovering the author's intended message can be problematic. Consequently, we feel it is more productive simply to view the text simply as a stimulus. In trying to understand how readers process that textual stimulus, it is important to specify the features and characteristics that can be objectively found in the text, but it is not important to know what the author may or may not have intended.

Text Is Not Communication: A Challenge to a Common Assumption

In two experiments, we investigated how text recall was related to moment-to-moment variations in mental state while reading, and how both recall and mental state were related to the interest value of the text. In both experiments, subjects read either an interesting text (a segment of Rice's Interview with the Vampire [A. Rice, 1997, Interview with the vampire, New York. NY: Ballantine Books] or a less interesting text (a segment of Thackery's The History of Pendennis [W. M. Thackery, 2009/1914, The history of Pendennis, Project Gutenberg, Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7265]). The texts were read sentence-by-sentence on a computer screen, and subjects were periodically interrupted to answer a probe question. In Experiment 1, the probe asked whether subjects were attending to the text; in Experiment 2, the probe asked whether subjects were engaged with the story world. After reading the text, subjects were asked to recall as much of the story as possible. Recall of the material just prior to the probe was examined as a function of the whether the ratings were high, medium, or low. As expected, both on-task ratings and engagement ratings were higher for Interview than for Pendennis, but there were a substantial number of medium ratings given to both stories. In Experiment 1, there was a clear effect of story on recall over and above the effect of on-task rating. However, in Experiment 2, recall was purely a function of engagement rating. The results were interpreted in terms of a model in which recall is largely determined by the situation model representation of the narrative and in which engagement ratings (but not on-task ratings) provide a relatively pure index of the allocation of resources to processing of the situation model.Keywords: mind wandering, construction and integration, reading, situation modelThe present article builds on recent research on mind wandering in reading that demonstrates that with some frequency, readers fail to attend to the reading task. For example, readers report "zoning out" while reading with frequencies as high as 23% (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004). Such inattention has, of course, negative implications for processing and later memory for the text (Schooler et al., 2004; Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008). However, in the present research we argue that in a complex task such as reading, the simple distinction between attending to the task and not attending to the task fails to capture important determinants of later memory. In particular, there is a range of different mental processes in reading to which one may allocate attentional resources. As a heuristic, we distinguish between construction processes that identify the meanings of words and sentences and integration processes that connect that information to long-term memory and build a situation model (Kintsch, 1988; Kintsch, Welsch, Schmalhofer, & Zimny, 1990). The two experiments reported here provide evidence on how the allocation of resources to off-task processes, construction processes, and integration processes affects subsequent memory.In what follows, we first elaborate a characterization of mind wandering as the allocation of attentional resources to mental processes unrelated to the text. Second, we discuss the relationship between resource allocation and subsequent memory. While it is intuitive that poor memory would result if one is not devoting resources to the task, the details of the relationship between how resources are allocated and what is remembered may be more complex. Finally, we describe the potential role of textual interest value in determining resource allocation and subsequent memory. The manipulation of the nature of the text provides the tool used in the present pair of studies for distinguishing different models of the relationship between resource allocation and memory. The first experiment demonstrates that interest value has an effect on subsequent memory that is not mediated purely by attention to the task. …

Marisa Bortolussi

Papers

Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response

Literary processing and interpretation: Towards empirical foundations

Text Is Not Communication: A Challenge to a Common Assumption

Construction, integration, and mind wandering in reading.

The effects of formal training on literary reception