The Impact of Inferred Event Knowledge versus Event Structure on Building Narratives

Situation models, mental representation of events that are unfolding in the environment, are known to help structure our experiences in our memory, but what exactly are the ingredients of a situation model and to what degree do abstract event features contribute to the updating cycle of a situation model? Here, we used an event card experiment in which we systematically manipulated abstract event feature dimensions (e.g., narrative X has a location change from event 1 to 2) and narrative specific factors (e.g., John walked from the kitchen into the living room after having a coffee). During this experiment, participants actively constructed a narrative from a random order of event descriptions, presented as event cards. After narrative construction, memory of the narrative specific events was tested in an oddball paradigm. We investigated the influence of the abstract factors “degree of feature change” and “position within the story” on response speeding during the oddball task. We discovered that participants were faster for oddballs with a different degree of feature change, which interacted with whether the oddball was from within the same story or from another story. When zooming in on oddballs from other stories only, we found an interaction between position within the event structure and degree of feature change. Our results suggest that people make use of an abstraction for keeping track of an event feature space and narrative specific representations. These abstractions of event features are important for the instantiation of a situation model.