Situation Models : The Mental Leap Into Imagined Worlds

15 When reading a fictional text, most readers feel they are in the middle of the story, and they eagerly or hesitantly wait to see what will happen next. Readers get inside of stories and vicariously experience them. They feel happy when good things occur, worry when characters are in danger, feel sad, and may even cry when misfortune strikes. While in the middle of a story, they are likely to use past tense verbs for events that have already occurred, and future tense for those that have not. In the 1980s, researchers proposed that understanding a story, or any text for that matter, involves more than merely constructing a mental representation of the text itself. Comprehension is first and foremost the construction of a mental representation of what that text is about: a situation model. Thus, situation models are mental representations of the people, objects, locations, events, and actions described in a text, not of the words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs of a text. The situation model view predicts that comprehenders are influenced by the nature of the situation that is described in a text, rather than merely by the structure of the text itself. As a first illustration, consider the following sentences: Mary baked cookies but no cake versus Mary baked cookies and cake. Both sentences mention the word cake explicitly, but only the second sentence refers to a situation in which a cake is actually present. If comprehenders construct situation models, the concept of cake should be more available to them when the cake is in the narrated situation than when it is not, despite the fact that the word cake appears in both sentences. Consistent with this prediction, students who read (from a computer screen) short narratives containing sentences such as these recognized words (presented immediately after each text) more quickly when the denoted object was actually present in the narrated situation than when it was not (MacDonald & Just, 1989). G.A. Radvansky and I have recently reviewed the extensive literature on situation models (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Here, I focus specifically on the evidence pertaining to situation models as vicarious experiences in narrative comprehension. When we place ourselves in a situation, we have a certain spatial, temporal, and psychological " vantage " point from which we vicariously experience the events. Such a perspective has been termed a deictic center, and the shift to this …