Menu Food Bill Money Tip Roles : Customer Waiter

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 twoor 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.