Construction, Integration, and Mind Wandering in Reading

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.