Narrative cognition versus - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Narrative cognition versus cognition in general

Verbal narrative versus

screen basedSlide2

Summary

Situation

models+event

segmentation:

modelling

environment, film and verbal narrative are similar

But these are not enough to explain narrative comprehension by film or word

Seen in this light, verbal narrative comprehension makes richer use of the episodic memory system, with implications for creativitySlide3

Situation models

Zwaan

and

Radvansky

– how can we remember one part of the story to the next, when verbatim memory is so short?

Pioneering work focussed on scene construction“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”Slide4

Event segmentation

Zacks

et al – how can we understand our environment at different temporal levels?

By dividing it into hierarchically

organised

chunksSlide5

Situation models

Monitor five dimensions:

Time: ‘an hour later John was still there’

Space: ‘he left the room and went on to the street’

Causation/interaction with objects: ‘the table shook’

Motivation/goals: ‘suddenly he no longer wanted to win. Instead, he wanted to sleep’

Progagonist: ‘While John did this, Susan was looking at him’. Slide6

Event boundaries

When you get change on several dimensions at once:

‘Suddenly wanting to punish her, John leapt up, clenching his fists, and ran into the living room, knocking over the lamp as he went’Slide7

Evidence

Zacks

et al, experiments on brain activity as ‘

timelocked

’ to event boundaries in verbal stories and film

Embodied language processing (Zwaan

, Glenberg, Reddy, Hauk)Slide8

Does this really solve the problem of narrative inference?

It is a long time ago now, as much as two thousand years maybe, that there was a rich man and he had a wife and she was beautiful and good, and they loved each other very much but they had no children even though they wanted some so much, the wife prayed and prayed for one both day and night, and still they did not and they did not get one. In front of their house was a garden and in the garden stood a juniper tree. Once, in wintertime, the woman stood under the tree and peeled herself an apple, and

as she was peeling the apple she cut her finger and the blood fell onto the snow. ‘Ah,’ said the woman and sighed a deep sigh, and she looked at the blood before her and her heart ached. ‘If I only had a child as red as blood and as white as snow.’ And as she said it, it made her feel very happy, as if it was really going to

happen.Slide9

A four year old reader

How does she know why the woman feels happy when she pricks her finger?

Why isn’t she puzzled?Slide10

By modifying her world model

of

proximal

and

distal

causes (Friston/Clark)She can’t probe the text for more information (what did the man look like?)

The images of blood and snow are isolated from fuller environment

So mentally, their properties can interact (heat/cold, red/white)

This interaction forms part of the child’s causal model of the story, but not of the worldSlide11

Also true of film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

glpOzs8YLDI

Jerky movements are

synchronised

with the music

Boat light synchronised with the stars

The ‘agent’ has an expressionless ‘motiveless’ face

Causal structure: dictated by features of the environment, not by goal-oriented actionSlide12

Reconceptualisation and creativity

Margaret

Boden

/Paul

Churchland

on creativity. Slide13

Processing which is specific to narrative

Every story generates a pattern of experience in the reader/hearer/viewer which is unique, and therefore a model of causality which is unique

Narrative comprehension is not just

SIMULATION + AESTHETIC/EMOTIONAL EFFECTS

(though may have strong family resemblance to other stories, and exploits our model of the environment)Slide14

Medium-specific narratives

Within that similarity, what are the differences between word and screen?

E

pisodic memory system

:

Sensory detail + coherenceScene constructionSlide15

Sensory fragments + coherence (Conway)

Film gives us all the sensory information, even if we don’t attend/remember it all.

Words don’t – they select, as memory has to

Fragments = taste, sight, texture of lemon/cherry/peppermint

Coherence = ‘turned up’, conflation of art and nature ‘fluted’, ‘lusted’ = the world as designed

And among the candy-like blobs of sea-licked glass – lemon, cherry, peppermint – and the banded pebbles, and the little fluted shells with lustred insides, sometimes small bits of pottery, still beautiful in glaze and

color

, turned up

(

Nabokov 1998 [1969], 235).Slide16

Scene construction – allocentric (long term) versus egocentric (short term)

Egocentric view = child crouching in sand = egocentric representation

But the metaphor turns the glass to sweets and in the mouth not the hand =

allocentric

?

https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v

=fq_D9Pc8s2I

And among the candy-like blobs of sea-licked glass – lemon, cherry, peppermint – and the banded pebbles, and the little fluted shells with lustred insides, sometimes small bits of pottery, still beautiful in glaze and

color

, turned up

(Nabokov 1998 [1969], 235).Slide17

Conclusion

Narratives in general depart from the causal models of the world we use in the environment.

Verbal narratives in particular use the resources of episodic memory for greater

creativity

meaning making

and for mental states with no obvious real world counterpartSlide18

Avraamides

et al, 2013, ‘Encoding and updating spatial information presented in narratives’

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,

66 (4), 642-670.

Burgess et al, 2001, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – series B

, 356, 1493 – 1503.Hassabis and Maguire, 2007, ‘Deconstructing episodic memory with construction’,

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

, 11 (7), 299-306.

Hassabis

,

Kumaran

and Maguire, 2007, ‘Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory’,

The Journal of Neuroscience

, 27 (52), 14365-14374.

Horton and Rapp, 2003, ‘Out of sight, out of mind: occlusion and the accessibility of information in narrative comprehension’,

Psychonomic

Bulletin and Review

, 10 (1) 1040110.

Jajdelska,

Buter

, Kelly, McNeill &

Overy

, 2010, ‘Crying, moving and keeping it whole: what makes literary descriptions of faces vivid?’,

Poetics Today

, 31 (3) 433-463.

Jajdelska, forthcoming (2016) ‘Being there yet not there: why don’t embodied responses to literary texts jar with one another?’,

Journal of Literary Semantics

.

Zacks

,

Speer

& Reynolds, 2009, ‘Segmentation in reading and film comprehension’,

American Psychological Association

, 138 (2), 307-327.

Zacks

et al (2001) ‘Human brain activity time-locked to perceptual event boundaries’,

Nature Neuroscience

, 4, 651-55.

Zwaan

&

Radvansky

(1998) ‘Situation models in language comprehension and memory’,

Psychological Bulletin

, 123, 162-185.