Here ’s a clever demonstration of how we simulate the mental experiences of story characters

By Christian Jarrett Avid readers of novels know that they often take the perspective of the characters they read about. But just how far does this mental role-playing go? A new paper in the Journal of Memory and Language has provided a clever demonstration of how readily we simulate the thoughts of fictional characters. Borrowing a method from research into the psychology of deliberate forgetting, the researchers at Binghamton University, USA, show that when a story character needs to focus on remembering one series of words rather than another, the reader simulates this same memory process in their own minds. The character’s mental experience becomes the reader’s mental experience. In one experiment, Danielle Gunraj and her colleagues asked about 100 undergrads to read a vignette about Nadia and Lyle, who’d just moved from New York to North Dakota. Nadia decides to go shopping for their new place and makes a list of 15 items to buy from an emporium (the vignette then details the list of items). Half the participants then read that Nadia changed her mind and that she drew up a new list of items (again these are listed) to buy at Walmart. The other half the participants read that Nadia decided to go to both the emporium and Walmart to buy both lists of items. Effectively, this is an implicit version of an established memory test used in research into deliberate forgetting: half the participants had been cued that Nadia needed to forget the first list and fo...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Memory Reading Source Type: blogs