Richard J. Gerrig

Stony Brook University | Stony Brook · Department of Psychology

Clark and Fischer (C&F) discuss how people interact with social robots in the context of a general analysis of interaction with characters. I suggest that a consideration of aesthetic illusion would add nuance to this analysis. In addition, I illustrate how people's experiences with other depictions of characters require adjustments to C&F's claims...

In this article, I use the metaphor that readers journey to narrative worlds to review research that has spanned my career. In the first section, I consider the processes that enable readers to undertake these journeys as well as the processes that allow them to participate in the narrative worlds once they have arrived. In the second section, I re...

Emotional responses are a central feature of readers’ narrative experiences. Situations in which readers adopt characters’ goals and experience similar emotional reactions to story events are often the focus of research on readers’ experiences of stories. However, readers may understand (or appraise) story events in a way that differs from the main...

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters’ emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely bo...

Research evidence supports the claim that engagement with works of fiction may benefit readers’ social cognitive abilities of empathy and theory of mind. However, there is little direct evidence to support claims about the causal mechanisms underlying the positive influence of leisure reading. Simulation theory has emerged as the most common explan...

What does it mean to be transported by a narrative?to create a world inside one’s head? How do experiences of narrative worlds alter our experience of the real world? In this book Richard Gerrig integrates insights from cognitive psychology and from research linguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism to provide a cohesive account of what we ha...

This chapter explores the claim that readers have unique experiences of narratives as a product of their accumulated memories-memories of their own life events as well as the knowledge they have acquired through their interactions with narrative worlds. In particular, the chapter draws on theories and empirical research from cognitive psychology to...

This meta-analysis investigates the extent to which people’s leisure reading may produce better social–cognitive abilities. Researchers have hypothesized that experiences of fiction (more so than nonfiction) will improve readers’ empathy and theory of mind. To capture the size of this effect, we aggregated correlations between measures of lifetime...

Horton and Gerrig (2005a) outlined a memory-based processing model of conversational common ground that provided a description of how speakers could both strategically and automatically gain access to information about others through domain-general memory processes acting over ordinary memory traces. In this article, we revisit this account, review...

Narratives often provide readers with opportunities to encode their preferences for particular outcomes. Our project examines some origins of such outcome preferences. For example, past literature suggests that readers tend to prefer positive outcomes for “good” characters and negative outcomes for “bad” characters. To extend this result, we had pa...

in press, Topics in Cognitive Science

The scope of visual attention changes dynamically over time. Although previous research has reported conditions that suppress peripheral visual processing, no prior work has investigated how attention changes in response to the variable emotional content of audiovisual narratives. We used fMRI to test for the suppression of spatially peripheral sti...

This project demonstrates how narrative mysteries provide a context in which readers engage in creative cognition. Drawing on the concepts of convergent and divergent thinking, we wrote stories that had either convergent or divergent outcomes. For example, one story had a character give his girlfriend a ring (a convergent outcome) whereas the contr...

people often encounter language in contexts that provide meanings that go beyond previous experience. for example, people recover metaphorical meanings that displace literal meanings for the same words. for such cases, researchers have addressed the question of whether contextual support allows people to truncate or eliminate consideration of meani...

Readers' narrative experiences are anything but passive. Consider a moment from the suspense novel A Wanted Man (Child, 2012). The hero, Jack Reacher, has been systematically working his way through a fortresslike structure, eliminating his enemies. He finally arrives at a room that contains the person he is trying to rescue, Don McQueen. He finds...

As readers gain experience with specific narrative worlds, they accumulate information that allows them to experience events as normal or unusual within those worlds. In this article, we contrast two accounts for how readers access information about specific narrative worlds to make tacit judgments of normalcy. We conducted two experiments. In Expe...

Research has demonstrated that readers track the objective status of characters' goals (i.e., whether the goals have been completed). We suggest that readers also use characters' subjective representations—characters' mental states with respect to goals—to comprehend actions. We explored circumstances in which local information about characters' su...

Previous research has demonstrated that the scope of speakers’ planning in language production varies in response to external forces such as time pressure. This susceptibility to external pressures indicates a flexibly incremental production system: speakers plan utterances piece by piece, but external pressures affect the size of the pieces speake...

The authors suggest that, as people experience narratives, they often generate mental responses that parallel responses they make when participating in real-world events. In 2 experiments, they used a think-aloud procedure to explore the range of such participatory responses that participants generated while viewing film excerpts. In Experiment 1,...

We asked whether agreement between the affective quality of a word and a subject’s emotional mood would cause faster identification of that word. In Experiment 1, subjects induced to feel happy or angry were required to choose which of two words had been briefly presented. The target and distractor words were pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Mood-...

In ordinary conversation, speakers experience pressures both to produce utterances suited to particular addressees and to do so with minimal delay. To document the impact of these conversational pressures, our experiment asked participants to produce brief utterances to describe visual displays. We complicated utterance planning by including tangra...

As people experience narratives, they often behave as if they are participants in the narrative world. This talk embraces that claim to develop a participatory perspective on readers' and viewers' narrative experiences. This perspective asserts, for example, that readers encode participatory responses as reactions to characters' utterances and acti...

Readers often have quite different experiences of literary texts. In this article, I suggest that readers’ life experiences affect the knowledge they bring to bear on narrative experiences as well as the responses they encode as those experiences unfold. I use an episode from the novel Transmission to illustrate potential individual differences in...

Theories of pronoun resolution often assume that pronouns' referents reside in the immediate discourse context. However, language users regularly produce and comprehend unheralded pronouns that violate that assumption. This article provides a taxonomy of unheralded pronouns that makes reference to speakers' and addressees' common ground. Data from...

When people read narratives, they have ample opportunities to encode mental preferences about characters' decisions. In our present project, we examined how readers' preferences for characters' decisions structure their experiences of story outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants read brief stories and explicitly rated which of two potential decisi...

Current theories of text processing say little about how authors' narrative choices, including the introduction of small mysteries, can affect readers' narrative experiences. Gerrig, Love, and McKoon (2009) provided evidence that 1 type of small mystery-a character introduced without information linking him or her to the story-affects readers' mome...

In our essay, we suggest that readers bring two types of processes to bear on their narrative experiences: intuitive processes and reflective processes. After defining these types of processes, we provide three examples of their consequences for readers' experiences. First, we suggest that a shift from intuitive to reflective processes may prompt r...

To characterize readers' narrative experiences, literary scholars have often made a distinction between story—what is being told—and discourse—the manner in which it is being told (for a review, see Herman 2002). Even simple stories permit unlimited variation in the manner of narration. Each completed narrative represents an author's decisions abou...

In this chapter, we outline a participatory perspective on readers' experiences of narrative. The perspective asserts that readers function as side participants to narrative events: They encode participatory responses as reactions to characters' utterances and actions. We review a series of empirical projects that illustrate consequences of reader...

The present research examined how positive and negative moods affect readers' understanding of positive and negative story endings. It demonstrated how negativity bias and mood congruence emerge during narrative comprehension. Participants were induced to experience either a positive or a negative mood and then read stories that could have either a...

When readers experience narratives they often encounter small mysteries-questions that a text raises that are not immediately settled. In our experiments, participants read stories that introduced characters by proper names (e.g., "It's just that Brandon hasn't called in so long"). Resolved versions of the stories specified the functions those char...

People's memories must be able to represent experiences with multiple types of origins—including the real world and our own imaginations, but also printed texts (prose-based media), movies, and television (screen-based media). This study was intended to identify cues that distinguish prose- and screen-based media memories from each other, as well a...

Juslin & Västfjäll's (J&V's) discussions of evaluative conditioning and episodic memory focus on circumstances in which music becomes associated with arbitrary life events. However, analyses of film music suggest that viewers experience consistent pairings between types of music and types of narrative content. Researchers have demonstrated that the...

In this article, the authors examined readers' sensitivity to the match between characters' goals and characters' actions. In Experiment 1, readers integrated actions consistent with characters' goals more easily when there was a match between the extremeness of the actions and the urgency of the goals. In Experiments 2 and 3, characters' actions w...

As readers experience narratives, they have ample opportunities to generate expectations about likely outcomes. We suggest that past research on such expectations has ignored the extent to which readers bring their own preferences to bear on those outcomes. In four experiments, we demonstrate that reader preferences can influence expectations for f...

in narrative contexts, people often find themselves mentally rooting for “bad guys.” these circumstances lead to questions about how sunstein's moral heuristics function during narrative experiences. in particular, must people undertake explicit moral analysis for the heuristics to apply?

Speakers in conversation routinely engage in audience design. That is, they construct their utterances to be understood by particular addressees. Standard accounts of audi-ence design have frequently appealed to the notion of common ground. On this view, speakers produce well-designed utterances by expressly considering the knowledge they take as s...

Speakers often tailor their utterances to the needs of particular addressees--a process called audience design. We argue that important aspects of audience design can be understood as emergent features of ordinary memory processes. This perspective contrasts with earlier views that presume special processes or representations. To support our accoun...

In this article, we articulate the critical differences between memory-based processing and explanation-based processing. We suggest that the most important claim of memory-based text processing is that the automatic processes that function with respect to text processing are all applications of ordinary memory processes. This claim contrasts with...

In this article, we articulate the critical differences between memory-based processing and explanation-based processing. We suggest that the most important claim of memory-based text processing is that the automatic processes that function with respect to text processing are all applications of ordinary memory processes. This claim contrasts with...

Review of book Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists by Patrick Colm Hogan (see record 2003-06662-000 ). The book appears to be more directed toward broadening the scope of cognitive scientific analyses of literature and the arts than informing humanists about what cognitive science has already accomplished. Throughout...

Most psychological researchers now accept the premise that literary narra- tives have an effect on people's everyday lives. Contemporary research examines the types of psychological processes that give rise to literary impact. The article describes experiments in two broad areas. First, it supports a position called the willing construc- tion of di...

this article is to introduce these inferences and to explore ways in which readers use one type of evidence, characters' utterances, to project knowledge to characters

Reviews the book, Mental Models and the Interpretation of Anaphora by Alan Garnham (see record 2001-01257-000 ). It is contended that overall, Garnham's review of the theoretical and empirical literature on anaphor interpretation makes a strong case for its centrality to theories of language processing. The volume is less successful, however, in a...

In this paper, we develop an account of the types of experiences through which speakers learn to design their utterances for particular addressees. We argue that there are two important aspects of conversational situations relevant to considerations of audience design. First, speakers must become aware that audience design is necessary in the curre...

We suggest that when readers experience narratives, their expectations about the likelihood of narrative events are informed by two types of analyses. Reality-driven analyses incorporate real-world constraints involving, for example, time and space; plot-driven analyses incorporate concerns about outcomes that emerge from the plot. We explored the...

This anthology is based on the assumption that cognitive psychology is at heart empirical philosophy. Many of the core questions about thought, language, perception, memory, and knowledge of other people's minds were for centuries the domain of philosophy. The book begins with the philosophical foundations of inquiry into the nature of mind and tho...

Our experiments explore readers' application of trait-based situation models for narrative characters. In the first episode of each of our experimental stories, characters performed behaviors that allowed readers to construct trait inferences (e.g., Albert's shoes were “buried under old candy wrappers, crumpled magazines, and some dirty laundry.”)....

Dixon and Bortolussi (2001) argued that researchers should not investigate text processing as being analogous to spoken conversation. They suggested that researchers studying text processing would be better served by treating texts as artifacts rather than as the products of authorial intentions. In our commentary, we provide 2 counterarguments to...

What are the memory processes that produce coherent representations of temporally discontinuous experiences? In this ar- ticle, we describe the memory process ofresonance, a process that provides renewed access to long-term memory information that is relevant to cues in working memory. Our experiments demonstrate parallel waxing and waning of infor...

What inferences do readers make about “who knows what” in narrative worlds? We introduce the concepts of projected knowledge and projected co-presence to describe circumstances in which readers infer that characters possess information presented, for example, only in narration. Our experiments examine one type of evidence readers use to project kno...

In 2 experiments, we tested the prediction that perceptions of sarcasm are influenced critically by 2 factors: the size of the situational disparity between speakers' beliefs, desires, or expectations and actual outcomes; and the memory cues presented by the ironic utterance that directs perceivers' attention to the situational disparity. Experimen...

The reviewer concludes that the author makes a persuasive case for why parents should share picture books with their children and discusses the potential psychological impact of picture books in fluid and compelling prose which merits a broad audience. In fact, the reviewer found one of the strongest features of the book (see record 1999-08125-000...

Keysar (1994) suggested that language users fall prey to the "illusory transparency of intention," a phenomenon in which individuals misapply their own privileged knowledge to predict others' interpretations of utterances. In Keysar's experiments, readers sometimes judged story characters' remarks as sarcastic when they, but not the narrative addre...

In Gerrig, Ohaeri, and Brennan (this issue) we called into question whether "illusory transparency" (Keysar, 1994) is actually an interesting and perplexing phenomenon, or whether readers are simply perplexed when protagonists in stories behave uncooperatively or irrationally. In this commentary, we highlight data from our original experiments that...

What does Evian boy mean? Researchers have offered a variety of theories to predict readers' interpretations of such noun-noun combinations outside discourse context. The purpose of this article is to contrast circumstances in which readers attempt to determine the meaning of noun-noun combinations, like Evian boy, with and without support from s...

To understand eponymous verb phrases such as "do a John Travolta," readers cannot merely select a sense out of a mental lexicon (sense selection). They must create new senses (sense creation) by retrieving salient information from memory. We conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that these processes of memory retrieval parallel those use...

In this chapter, we begin by outlining what we know, from phenomenological experience, common sense, and existing data, about the psychology of fiction. Next we describe several models of the processes underlying belief and attitude formation. We rely on several models rather than just one, because each was developed to explain different phenomena,...

The functionality of memory‐based text processing can be described as making ready a range of information of potential relevance to readers’ ongoing understanding of texts. In past research, we have demonstrated that a reunion between two characters renews the accessibility of information mutually known to them, making the information ready for inc...

Research on text processing has generally focused on the types of inferences that all readers draw in common. Our research examines aspects of processing that depend on the particular relation of the reader to the text. Students read fictional stories that contained weak and unsupported assertions and that were set either at their own school or at...

A memory-based processing approach to discourse comprehension emphasizes the rapid deployment of information in memory to facilitate understanding of the text that is currently being read. S. B. Greene, R. J. Gerrig, G. McKoon, and R. Ratcliff (1994) demonstrated that when a text described the reunion of 2 characters who had previously discussed a...

A memory-based processing approach to discourse comprehension emphasizes the rapid deployment of information in memory to facilitate understanding of the text that is currently being read. S. B. Greene, R. J. Gerrig, G. McKoon, and demonstrated that when a text described the reunion of 2 characters who had previously discussed a 3rd character, the...

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of metaphor-based schemas in text comprehension and representation. In Experiment 1, schemas facilitated recognition judgements for schema-related sentences that had been presented in a text. Similar facilitation was found for the recognition of individual words in Experiments 2, 3, and 4. The res...

The proposition that the course of language acquisition is constrained in some ways by the cognitive preparedness of the child is widely accepted. Because some of the distinctions languages require are beyond children's understanding at the chronological moment at which they begin to acquire language, language development must often await cognitive...

We suggest that readers' reports of suspense are moderated by their perceptions of the range of solutions available to a textual dilemma. We provide seven experiments to test this relationship between problem solving and suspense. In each experiment subjects read texts that placed James Bond (or some other fictional hero) in a situation of grave da...

This discussion uses the evidence adduced in the current issue's symposium on autobiographical narrative to examine the feasibility of the standard division of narrative from paradigmatic thought. It is suggested, first, that there is no evidence to support the assertion that representations of narrative information do not give rise spontaneously t...

Pronouns are unheralded when they appear without an explicit antecedent in the immediate context. Speakers use such pronouns when they believe, by virtue of common ground with an addressee, that a referent is implicitly in the focus of attention. In a series of three experiments, we use unheralded pronouns to demonstrate the waxing and waning of th...

Four experiments demonstrated that the comprehension of novel compound nouns involves the recognition of a general relationship between two categories. Experiment 1 found that reading time is not impaired when a story only implicitly gives the relation underlying a compound noun. Experiment 2 demonstrated that comprehension of both explicit and imp...

In the course of understanding a narrative, readers generate participatory responses (or p-responses) that arise as a consequence of involvement in the text. For example, a reader might express a mental preference that one of a pair of combatants win a battle. In three experiments we showed that readers' p-responses, in the form of preferences abou...