Different Kinds of Causality in Event Cognition

Narrative memory is better for information that is more causally connected and occurs at event boundaries, such as a causal break. However, it is unclear whether there are common or distinct influences of causality. For the event boundaries that arise as a result of causal breaks, the events that follow may subsequently become more causally connected to it as people seek to understand why the break occurred and the consequences of it. Thus, although a causal break has no prior causal connections, it may be linked to many pieces of subsequent information, thereby ultimately affecting memory for it. As such, better memory would be due to increased final causal connectivity, not to being an event boundary of the causal break, per se. The current study had people read and recall narratives that were coded for causal breaks and causal connectivity. The results revealed slower reading times and better memory for causal breaks and faster reading times and better memory with increased prior causal connections. Although there were more causal connections in total for causal break sentences, they each influenced processing, which suggests separate factors impact memory.