generally speaking, lexical items that enter our minds through reading a text commonly leave us with pictures, sounds, echoes, and feelings in the mind. while the ability to produce images in the mind in the process of reading appears to be vital for greater comprehension and recall of texts, research has indicated that many poor readers seemingly do not visualize as they read. on the contrary,...

The Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) left us a vast body of works which are considered outstanding in many ways. In 1960, she published a short story, entitled "El médico encantador" (The Charming Physician), in the renowned literary magazine Sur. The central character of this piece is a family doctor named Albino Morgan, who had a secret truth: in any house he visited, all variety...

Substantial evidence from animal studies suggests that enhanced memory associated with emotional arousal results from an activation of beta-adrenergic stress hormone systems during and after an emotional experience. To examine this implication in human subjects, we investigated the effect of the beta-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol hydrochloride on long-term memory for an emotionally...

Many computational models of narrative include representations of possible worlds—events that never actually occur in the story but that are planned or perceived by the story’s characters. Psychological tools such as QUEST are often used to validate computational models of narrative, but they only represent events which are explicitly narrated in the story. In this paper, we demonstrate that au...

In this paper we look into a simple approach for generating characterbased stories using planning and the language of PDDL. A story often involves modalities over properties and objects, such as what the characters believe, desire, request, etc. We look into a practical approach that reifies such modalities into normal objects of the planning domain, and relies on a “mood” predicate to represen...

The results of a number of studies indicate that prelingually deaf children raised in a spoken language environnent appear to have difficulty in understanding and retelling stories. Various explanations have been offered: story understanding may be impaired by lack of background knowledge and vocabulary; the lack of access to the phonology of spoken language may reduce the capacity of short-ter...

Interactive story writing is a new medium for creative expression. The story “writer” uses a computer game (such as BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights) to create an interactive story where the “reader” is an active participant. The state of the art is that the story (plot, character behaviors, character interactions, conversations, etc.) is specified by writing scripts. Unfortunately, scripting is to...