The influence of situation models on the free recall of narrative texts

In a series of experiments, pre-training and instructional manipulations were employed to encourage some subjects to form only a text-based representation of a narrative while others were encouraged to construct a situation model of the events described in the narrative. Subjects encouraged to construct a spatial-situation model studied a diagram of a shopping center to provide them with prior knowledge appropriate for the narrative. They were given instructions that encouraged them to integrate information in the text with this prior knowledge. Control subjects were encouraged to construct a text-based representation of the narrative. They were instructed to prepare to write a summary of the text. Independent evidence from sentence recognition and map drawing ability tests indicate that these manipulations were successful in producing groups with the appropriate mental representations of the narrative. The representation constructed by the subjects influenced the content of free recall. Subjects constructing a situation model included more spatial information and model-based intrusions in free recall than text-based subjects. Situation models do not appear to guide the retrieval of information during free recall, except possibly under certain conditions where the situation model and text-based representations contain consistent-redundant information pertaining to the order of events in the narrative. Under these conditions, the situation model may serve to facilitate retrieval. The mnemonic benefits associated with the situation model may be more of an encoding than retrieval phenomenon. The processing goals of the situation-model subjects appears to have led them to construct a text-based representation that contained links to appropriate spatial-situational information contained in the situation model. During free recall, situation-model subjects may have been able to exploit the links that they had formed between the text-base and the situation model to access spatial-situational information. Text-based subjects may have constructed a typical narrative text-based representation that contained little technical information about spatial information mentioned in the story