There are twomain implications of this result

Ultimately, this might have to do with the importance of thesocial domain for us as human beings, as in every day life westrive to understand other people’s behavior with regard totheir intentions and motives

This suggests that readers may beable to more readily accommodate information which doesnot fit with their model for the current well-known fictionalscenario than information that does not fit with their knowl-edge of the real world

In conclusion, the current results suggest that character-based information stored in LTM allows for the rapid evalua-tion of a character’s described behavior in relation to thereader’s prior knowledge. In addition, it appears that viola-tions of this fictional character-based knowledge are moreeasily accommodated than violations of knowledge relatingto what is and what is not possible in the real world.

In summary, early measures of reading behavior showedthat readers made more regressive eye movements, and hadlonger regression path (go-past) reading times when theyencountered the critical region of sentences which containedreal world and narrative inconsistencies. This is consistentwith the ERP findings from Experiment 1, and suggests thatwhen readers encounter information that is inconsistent withtheir prior knowledge regarding a well-known character’sbehavior, or inconsistent with their knowledge of the realworld, then this has an early influence on on-line languageprocessing

Materials and design

Eye movements were recorded via an SR Research Eyelink1000 eye-tracker, which sampled eye position every millise-cond. Viewing was binocular, but only the right eye wasrecorded. Materials were displayed on a computer monitorapproximately 72 cm from participants’ eyes. Before the startof the experiment, the procedure was explained and partici-pants were instructed to read normally and for comprehen-sion. Participants were seated at the eye-tracker and placedtheir head on a chin and forehead rest to minimize headmovements. Participants then completed a calibration pro-cedure. Before the start of each trial, a fixation box appearedin the upper left quadrant of the screen. Once the participantfixated this box the stimulus computer displayed the targettext. If the participant’s apparent point of fixation did notmatch with the fixation box then the experimenter re-calibrated the eye-tracker. Once the participant had finishedreading each item, they pressed a key. A comprehensionquestion was displayed following one third of trials. A correctresponse rate of 97% indicated that participants were readingfor comprehension

we aimed to investigate the utilization ofcharacter-based information stored in LTM during on-linelanguage processing. More specifically, we examined whetherthe mere presence of a fictional context generally influencesonline processes underlying text comprehension, andwhether readers carefully track the behavior of well-knowncharacters

The ‘real world inconsistent’ conditiondescribed an action (e.g., a man picking up a lorry) that isinconsistent with the reader’s knowledge of the world

the critical questions we ask here are, when readingabout a well-known fictional character, (a) does the merepresence of a fictional context have a general influence onprocessing, and (b) do readers carefully evaluate incominginformation in terms of their prior experience of thischaracter

It is important tonote, however, that research on narrative comprehension hasbeen exclusively concerned with inferences based on informa-tion about characters provided in the text. It is therefore criticalto investigate whether similar inferential and predictive pro-cesses take place if the text introduces a fictional character thatis already well known to the reader, such as Dr. Gregory House orHarry Potter.

howed narrativeinconsistencies to have a disruptive influence on languageprocessing

It is an openquestion, however, how readers utilize their background knowl-edge in on-line processing of information relating to characterbehavio

To successfully comprehend a piece of text, readers mustform a mental representation of the people, objects, andevents that are being described, as well as the relationshipsbetween them. To this end, information provided by thecontent of the text must be integrated with informationalready possessed by the reader (background or general worldknowledge, including schemas and stereotypes), in order toconstruct a mental model