Theory of Mind (ToM) has been proposed to explain social interactions, with real people but also with fictional characters, by interpreting their mind as well as our own. “Perspective embedding” exploits ToM by placing events in characters’ minds (e.g., “he remembered she was home”). Three levels of embedment, common in literature, may be a “sweet spot” that provides enough information about a character’s motivation, but not a confusing over-abundance. Here, we use short vignettes with 1 or 3 characters and 0–5 levels of perspective embedding in two reading studies to see whether these preferences might be related to processing ease. Self-paced readers were fastest with one level of embedment, increasingly slower as embedment increased; vignettes without embedment were approximately as slow as level 4. With both self-paced and imposed timing, error rates on probe questions increased only at the fifth level. Readers seem to prefer literary texts in which ToM operations are obvious due to embedding of perspectives within the narrative but still somewhat challenging.
2022. Embedded Mental States, Literariness, and the Mutual Cross-Disciplinary Benefits of Cognitive-Literary Analysis. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 58:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
Tobin, Vera
2021. Where irony goes: routinization and the collapse of viewpoint configurations. Chinese Semiotic Studies 17:2 ► pp. 199 ff.
Lockwood, Jeffrey A., Anne M. Guzzo & Ashley Hope Carlisle
2020. Librettos, Sopranos, and Science: Communicating Ecology Through Opera. The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 101:3
Carpenter, Jordan M., Melanie C. Green & Kaitlin Fitzgerald
2016. Recursive Subsystems in Aphasia and Alzheimer's Disease: Case Studies in Syntax and Theory of Mind. Frontiers in Psychology 7
Jackson, Eric S., Mark Tiede, Deryk Beal & D. H. Whalen
2016. The Impact of Social–Cognitive Stress on Speech Variability, Determinism, and Stability in Adults Who Do and Do Not Stutter. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 59:6 ► pp. 1295 ff.
Jackson, Eric S., Mark Tiede, Michael A. Riley & D. H. Whalen
2016. Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Sentence-Level Speech Kinematics. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 59:6 ► pp. 1315 ff.
Whalen, D. H., Lisa Zunshine, Evelyne Ender, Eugenia Kelbert, Jason Tougaw, Robert F. Barsky, Peter Steiner & Michael Holquist
2015. Increases in Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even with Typical Text Presentation: Implications for the Reading of Literature. Frontiers in Psychology 6
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