Insider looking out versus outsider looking in: Perspective effects on the memory of textual information

Abstract

In discourse processing, it has been demonstrated in numerous studies that readers construct mental pictures of what they are reading. For example, when the sentence “A woman came into the house” is read, the reader will form a mental picture in which the front of the woman is seen and the woman is moving toward the observer. On the contrary, when the sentence “A woman went into the house” is read, the reader will imagine seeing the back of the woman and she is moving away from the observer. In most published studies, researchers compared different mental representations by asking readers to read different sets of sentences. In other words, the researchers manipulated the text to create different mental representations in the readers. In the current study, I demonstrated that different mental representations could be created in different readers even when all the readers were reading the same text. The method I used was asking people to recall the same story from the perspectives of different characters (e.g., characters inside a house versus characters outside of the house). For this reason, my experimental manipulation was on the reader, not on the text. I found that this perspective-driven recall had a long-term effect on what people later believed they had read in the original text. Conclusion: Imagination that takes place after reading can distort readers’ memory for what they have originally read.