Spatial and character situation model updating

During text comprehension, people create situation models to understand the described events. When a change in the situation happens, model updating can occur along multiple dimensions. Prior studies have looked at the separate effects of dimensional shifts finding an increase in processing time when a shift occurs. This reading time study used spatial and character shifts to assess the impact of updating on each other. Specifically, does a prior spatial shift affect character updating and vice versa? This follows recent work exploring the distinction between incremental and global updating. An experiment that manipulated spatial and character shifts as well as their order found influences of both shift types on comprehension, but they did not influence one another. A second experiment revealed that extensive prior knowledge of the spatial environment did not impact the pattern of results. Overall, these results are consistent with the idea that during the comprehension of continuous text event shifts are largely processed separately in a way consistent with incremental updating and may have combined effects. © 2014 Taylor and Francis.