Situation models in naturalistic comprehension

Abstract

Reading a discourse often leads to the construction of a situation model – a mental representation of the state of affairs described by the text. Situation model construction is associated with specific behavioral and neural markers. In this chapter, we consider the following questions: How does reading that involves constructing a situation model differ from other kinds of reading? Do the behavioral and neurophysiological data support a distinction between incremental updating of situation model components and global updating by abandoning an old situation model to form a new one? Do situation models represent information about sensory and motor features in analog representational formats during normal reading for comprehension? The available results indicate that specific mechanisms underlie different forms of situation model updating, that situation model-based reading is qualitatively different from reading without forming situation models, and that readers routinely deploy perceptual and motor representations to understand features of the situations described by a narrative. Reading is a cognitive tour de force. Just guiding the eyes to focus on the right part of the text at the right time is exquisitely complex (Rayner, Raney, & Pollatsek, 1995 ). Readers do this effortlessly, and also recognize complex patterns to identify letters, words, and larger units of text, parse strings of words into sentences, and recognize the meanings of words and sentences. However, to us t…