The Evolution of A Cognitive Psychologist A Journey From Simple Behavios To Complex Metal Acts

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Behaviors to Complex
Mental Acts
Gordon H. Bower
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305;
email: Gordon@psych.Stanford.edu
Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2008. 59:1–27 Key Words

The Annual Review of Psychology is online at human memory, skilled reading, mental models, knowledge
http://psych.annualreviews.org
representation, narrative focus, cognitive revolution, associative
This article’s doi: networks, chunking, memory organization, story grammars
10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093722
Copyright c 2008 by Annual Reviews. Abstract

All rights reserved
The author summarizes his evolving interests from conditioning
0066-4308/08/0203-0001$20.00 studies within a behaviorist orientation, thence to human memory,
knowledge representation, and narrative understanding and mem-
ory. Arguing that the study of skilled reading provides a microcosm
for revealing cognitive processes, he illustrates this by reviewing his
research on the use of spatial priming to investigate readers’ on-line
updating of their situational models of texts. Conceptual entities
close to the reader’s focus of attention within the model are readily
retrieved. Retrieval speed from memory declines with the probed ob-
ject’s distance from the current focus and decays with time elapsed
in the narrative since the item was last in focus. The focus effect
varies with the character’s perspective, his status in the story, his ac-
tive goals, and other factors. The results are accommodated within
an associative network model distinguishing just-read sentences in
short-term memory from activated portions of long-term memory
structures to which they refer.
1
Contents
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Major Versus Minor Characters . . . 14
Early College Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Intermediate Locations . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Yale Graduate School and Early Mental Location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Stanford Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Objects Accompanying the Main
Mathematical Models and Human Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Spatial Perspective Within the
MOVING INTO COGNITIVE Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
PSYCHOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Distance Effects in Anaphor
Major Influences Toward Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Cognitive Psychology . . . . . . . . . 4 Interference in Resolving
Organizational Factors in Ambiguous Anaphors . . . . . . . . . . 16
Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 What’s the Distance Metric? . . . . . . 16

Mnemonics and Mental Imagery . . 6 Learning a Spatial Layout from a
Human Associative Memory . . . . . . 6 Verbal Description . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
MOVING UP TO COHERENT Using Prelearned Spatial Arrays . . . 18
TEXT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Elapsed Story Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Why Study Narrative Priming by a Momentary Active
Understanding and Memory? . . 8 Goal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Story Grammars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Priming by Active, Completed, or
Consensus View of Event Postponed Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 A NETWORK EXPLANATION OF
Causal Analyses of Motives, FINDINGS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Actions, and Outcomes . . . . . . . . 10 Activating Associative Networks in
Goal-Based Explanations . . . . . . . . . 10 Long-term Memory . . . . . . . . . . . 20
The Spatial Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Explaining the Intermediate-Room
FOCUS AND UPDATING Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
WITHIN SITUATION Explaining the Goal-Relevance
MODELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Paradigm for Studying Spatial SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING
Priming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 COMMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
The Basic Distance-Effect . . . . . . . . 13
INTRODUCTION gression from simple animal conditioning ex-

Authors of prefatory chapters for earlier periments within the behaviorist tradition to
Annual Review of Psychology volumes wrote cognitive approaches to human learning and
scholarly reviews setting forth their contribu- memory, and, then, to human knowledge rep-
tions to a single major line of research. I am resentation and utilization. The arc reaches
opting instead for an autobiographic approach its culmination, and longest description, in
that touches on the major research topics the research on narrative comprehension and
that I have pursued over successive phases of memory that I carried out with several collab-
my career. Each topic could be elaborated to orators. I view my path as a conceptual pro-
chapter lengths, but page limits constrain that gression from the simple to the complex, and
impulse and rescue undaunted readers. Ac- as reflecting the expanding horizons and the-
cordingly, this narrative briefly tracks my pro- oretical ambitions of cognitive science.
2 Bower
Early College Years would rotate a wheel in the cage to turn it off.
The animals would repeat this on-off behav-
Influenced by a high school teacher, I
ior until both rodents and their observers grew
acquired an early interest in Freudian psy-
weary of it. Although I took courses in phys-
choanalysis, reading the psychoanalytic canon
iological psychology and learned techniques
extensively—Freud, Adler, Jung, Horney,
of precise electrode implantation, recording,
Fenichel, Sullivan, Rank, and Melanie
preparation, and histological examination of
Klein—during late high school and early col-
brain tissue, I preferred the more “behav-
lege at Western (now Case Western) Reserve
ioral” side of learning theory. While contin-
University in Cleveland, Ohio. As an aspiring
uing work with Miller, I concentrated my
psychiatrist, I waded through two years of
behavioral research increasingly with Yale’s
premed courses. After my freshman year, I

Frank Logan (1956, 1960). When I received
worked as a summer ward attendant at the
my PhD in 1959, I was a committed Hullian
Cleveland State mental hospital; later, during
theorist with a strong “animal learning”

my sophomore year, I was a part-time re-
orientation.
search assistant to the psychology staff there.
I set up an animal-learning lab when
Those sobering experiences convinced me of
I started my first job at Stanford Univer-
the somewhat primitive state of psychiatric
sity’s Psychology Department in fall, 1959.
knowledge and discouraged me from a career
The lab was located in a Quonset hut left-
in psychiatry. At the same time, I became
over from World War II. I built my rat
engrossed in an experimental psychology
runways, shuttle boxes, and operant condi-
class taught by a young ex-Yalie, Charles
tioning chambers there, using electrical com-
R. Porter, who introduced me to learning
ponents cannibalized from junked pinball ma-
theory, especially touting the quantitative
chines. With this hardware, I investigated
approach of Clark Hull (1952). That interest
such diverse conditioning topics as transfer of
put me on a path that led to Yale graduate
training between Pavlovian and instrumental
school and study with Neal Miller. At the
conditioning, schedules for developing avoid-
time, Miller was a premier learning theorist
ance and escape learning, reward contrast ef-
whose sympathies for psychoanalytic theory
fects among reinforcement conditions, frus-
were evident throughout the book Personality
tration from reward-reductions, “observing
and Psychotherapy that he coauthored with
responses” in rats and pigeons, and error-
John Dollard (Dollard & Miller 1950).
less discrimination learning. I was happily and
productively occupied, doing the kinds of re-
search I was trained to do. But seeds of doubt
Yale Graduate School and Early about my animal-learning approach germi-
Stanford Years nated as the allure of mathematical psychol-
I arrived at Yale in September 1955, just as ogy increasingly attracted my attention.
Miller was shifting his research focus to iden-
tifying the areas of the mammalian brain that
control reward, punishment, and biological Mathematical Models and Human
drives. My early work tested cats and rats to Learning
plumb the motivational effects of brain stim- Although I had started with an interest in
ulation. My first publication with Miller re- quantitative learning theory, this was not
ported a dual reward-punishment effect from Yale’s strength. Fortunately, I got a crash
stimulating spots in the rat’s limbic system course in mathematical learning theory after
(Bower & Miller 1958). My rats would press a my second year in graduate school by attend-
lever to turn on the brain stimulation at these ing a 1957 summer institute on mathematical
spots, but it quickly became aversive so they psychology sponsored by the Social Science
www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 3

Research Council. There I met many lead- breached by the forays of the revolutionary
ers, or soon-to-be leaders, of the emerging cognitive psychologists. The sudden contrast
mathematical psychology movement that was and jolt of this intellectual shift taught me to
a prominent stream within learning theory in stay nimble and be ready to move with the
the 1955 to 1975 era. That summer I formed a winds of change in academic psychology.
close intellectual bond with the leader of that
movement, Bill Estes, who became my men-
tor. By the early 1960s, Estes, Dick Atkinson, Major Influences Toward Cognitive
and I had been hired to join Patrick Sup- Psychology
pes at Stanford to fill out the mathematical The information-processing viewpoint.
learning theory segment of its department. The mid-1960s was a time of conceptual tur-
In those heady years, we attracted some of moil in experimental psychology. I was swept
the brightest graduate students who would up in several of its waves. The most power-
help lead the next generation, including (al- ful of these was the “information-processing”
phabetically) John Anderson, Bobby Klatzky, approach, which viewed perception and mem-
Steve Kosslyn, Douglas Hintzman, David ory as the taking in, transforming, storing, and
Rumelhart, and Richard Shiffrin. retrieving of packets of information. Lead-
ing proponents of this approach were George
Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Ulric Neisser.
MOVING INTO COGNITIVE The movement’s seminal works were Plans
PSYCHOLOGY and the Structure of Behavior by George Miller
We tested most of our mathematical models et al. (1960) and Cognition by Neisser (1967).
on data collected from college students learn- Both treatises upset the worldview of tradi-
ing such experimental tasks as paired asso- tional behaviorists. Donald Broadbent (1957,
ciates, free recall, serial learning, or simple 1958), the influential British leader of the
category (classification) learning. Since mas- information-processing approach, played a
sive amounts of data are easier to harvest from key role in directing the field into studies
college students than from rats, my animal re- of selective attention and immediate mem-
search was gradually displaced by my studies ory. Broadbent and Arthur Melton (1963)
of human learning. spearheaded the popularity of research stud-
So two years after I received my Yale de- ies of short-term memory. Several of us
gree, I was deeply engaged in studying human at Stanford developed mathematical mod-
“verbal learning” (as it was then called) de- els using an information-processing metaphor
spite having had no graduate training in this for short-term memory and its transfer to
field. To get up to speed, I read widely and long-term memory (Bower 1967). The dual-
prepared a lengthy review of human learn- storage model of Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968)
ing research in 1962, although the entire book became the leading theory of that era.
was not published until five years later (Bower
1967). At Yale, we had regarded Hullian be- Computer simulation modeling. Related
havior theory and animal learning, specifically revolutionary influences were computer sim-
studies of motivation and reinforcement, as ulation models of psychological processes as
royal roads to enlightenment, and we viewed exemplified in the work of Allen Newell and
studies of human learning as dull dead-ends. Herbert Simon (1961, 1963). Their mod-
The apparent dullness of this field seemed to els of psychological processes were arguably
be captured in its major text at that time, The even better specified than our mathematical
Psychology of Human Learning, by McGeogh & models, and their simulations could be run
Irion (1952). Yet, human memory was one of under differing experimental circumstances
the first barricades of tradition stormed and to gauge whether the models predicted the
4 Bower
behavior of real subjects. My first exposure to more complex information-processing mod-

computer-simulation modeling was in a 1963 els of language, a challenge that gave birth
summer workshop at RAND Corporation to psycholinguistics. Leading the first halting
with Simon, Newell, and several of their steps of this incipient field were George
students, including Ed Feigenbaum. The Miller and his colleagues at the Harvard
first viable simulation project I was associ- Cognitive Sciences Center. Chomsky and
ated with was the “Stimulus and Association Miller were largely responsible for promoting
Learner” (SAL) model of my student, Douglas language learning and language use as hot
Hintzman (1968). Doug and I showed how topics in cognitive psychology.
many standard results in human verbal learn-
ing could be simulated by an elementary
information-processing model. Specifically, Organizational Factors in Memory

SAL incrementally learned a discrimination Having worked on mathematical descriptions
net of features to distinguish among and re- of transfers of information from short-term to
spond to the stimuli of a paired associate list. long-term memory, I wanted to know more
These experiences instilled in me an abid- about what caused these transfers to succeed.
ing appreciation for the artificial-intelligence So my students and I studied the cognitive ma-
approach to knowledge acquisition and neuvers that people use to learn and remem-
utilization. ber things (Bobrow & Bower 1969, Bower &
Winzenz 1970). Many of us found that sheer
Chomsky and psycholinguistics. Another repetition and rote rehearsal of an item in
major influence in cognitive psychology short-term memory was woefully insufficient
was the Chomskian revolution in linguistics for recording a more long-lasting memory. So
(Chomsky 1957, 1965). I had met Noam what would accomplish this?
Chomsky at that 1957 Social Science Re-
search Council summer institute, when he Chunking in memory. I found clues in the
was assisting George Miller with a workshop literature describing the role that organiza-
on the psychology of language. Yet, I did not tion plays in memorizing. My studies of orga-
grasp the significance of Chomsky’s approach nizational aids to memory were greatly influ-
until I read his devastating critique (Chomsky enced by the ideas of George Katona (1940)
1959) of Fred Skinner’s book, Verbal Behavior on how subjects’ “understanding” of mate-
(1957). In his critique, Chomsky ripped the rials promotes memory, of George Miller
veil from our eyes, revealing that, regarding (1956) on chunking, and of Endel Tulving
the complexities of linguistic performance, (1962) and George Mandler (1967) on par-
our behaviorist emperor had no clothes. ticipants’ subjective organization in free re-
Chomsky persuasively argued that the call. Tulving and Mandler studied how peo-
stimulus-response approach was too impov- ple learned to free-recall lists of “unrelated”
erished to explain the complexities of verbal words studied repeatedly. They found that
behavior, suggesting that the behaviorist adult subjects spontaneously look for mean-
analysis would be useless for understanding ingful relations among the items, grouping
the learning and use of language. This them into “chunks,” and perhaps even orga-
unmasking came as a shock to those of us nizing the chunks into larger memory chunks.
raised on psychologists’ “internal stimuli and That prompted my research into the processes
response hierarchies,” which was the behav- that created or disrupted chunks in memory
iorists’ main tool in attempting to understand (Bower 1970a, 1972).
what language could do (Dollard & Miller
1950, Osgood 1953, Staats 1968). Chomsky Perceptual chunking and memory. In this
countered that psychologists should develop work, I was influenced by Solomon Asch’s

thesis that memory was an incidental by- metaphor of Gus Craik and Bob Lockhart
product of the person organizing the mate- (1972, Craik & Tulving 1975).
rials into a perceptual or conceptual unity or During this period, the style and content
whole (Asch 1969, Asch et al. 1960). By one of experimentation were markedly different
or another means, people come to view dis- from our previous learning research. Earlier
parate elements as inseparable parts of a single mathematical models had attempted to de-
unit. This hypothesis guided my studies on the scribe trial-by-trial performance of subjects
learning of “unrelated” pieces of information who were studying a collection of items re-
that we experimenters perceptually unitized peated over many trials. The newer memory
(or not) for our subjects (Bower et al. 1969, experiments typically involved single expo-
Bower & Winzenz 1969). Asch’s thesis also sures to the information to be remembered.
extended to the process of conceptual unitiza- Also, those later experiments often involved
tion and drew upon insights from mnemonic unintentional learning created by instructing
devices and mental imagery. As one con- subjects to carry out some specified “pro-
sequence, I began studies of mnemonic cessing” of the material (e.g., categorizing or
devices (Bower & Clark 1969, Bower imaging it) with no mention of its being mem-
1970b). orized. These topics and experimental meth-
ods were increasingly far removed from the
former mathematical models of learning on
which I had been working.
Mnemonics and Mental Imagery
Magicians and stage performers have long
used mnemonic devices to enhance their Human Associative Memory
memorization for disparate information, be While depth of processing is an arresting
it shopping lists, lecture topics, associating metaphor, it was not entirely satisfying for me
faces with names, their phone numbers, oc- (cf. Ross 1981). I wanted to understand what
cupations, spouses, hometowns, and so on. created “meaningful combinations” of mate-
I published studies on the mnemonic cod- rials that caused them to be learned so quickly.
ing (translation) of “meaningless nonsense” The easiest approach was to study the mean-
into “meaningful sense” and on how people ingfulness of conceptual combinations gen-
use language and imagery to form concep- erated through language. This belief led my
tual units. We found that in learning to as- student, John Anderson, and me to propose a
sociate pairs of unrelated words, memory was theory of how people use conceptual knowl-
greatly improved by instructing subjects to edge to encode and remember new combi-
search out and form meaningful relationships nations of concepts, especially descriptions
between the items, such as might be expressed of events and factual assertions. That theory
in a sentence—no matter how bizarre. Simi- was set forth in several articles and our book,
larly, asking subjects to construct a visual im- Human Associative Memory, affectionately
age of some interaction between the referents known as HAM (Anderson & Bower 1973).
of a pair of nouns greatly facilitated their re- Anderson and I began with the ideas about
call of the pair (Bower 1972b). At this time, semantic memory and question answering
Allan Paivio and his group at Western Ontario that Ross Quillian (1968) and Allan Collins
University were leading the research on men- (1969) had popularized (Collins & Quillian
tal imagery in learning (Paivio 1971). These 1969, 1972). That approach (Minsky 1968)
studies of associative learning via conceptual represents knowledge as a huge associative
or imagery combinations became a popular network. Within this network, a concept was
trend of the times, and were in sympathy with represented by a structured set of labeled as-
the contemporaneous “depth of processing” sociations among its related properties and
6 Bower
among other concepts. The meaning of a con- The Zeitgeist surrounding HAM. Our
cept is the collection of other concepts as efforts were part of the contemporary
well as referent sensory shapes and features Zeitgeist. Psychologists and artificial intel-
to which it is related. Memory retrieval was ligence (AI) researchers were then building
conceived as the cues in the question sending computer models of knowledge representa-
activation into corresponding regions of the tion and language understanding (Kintsch
associative network, searching for a matching 1974; Rumelhart et al. 1972; Schank 1975a,b;
structure. Although mildly adequate for rep- Winograd 1972). What set our work apart
resenting static knowledge, this approach did was that Anderson and I explicitly sought to
not address the learning of any new facts or relate our computer simulation model to the
concepts. Anderson and I wanted to encom- systematic laws and generalizations found in
pass new learning using an augmented asso- the human memory and learning tradition.
ciation theory. We believed that people learn Relying on simple assumptions, for example,
such new information by interassociating in- that associations are strengthened by repeti-
stances of familiar concepts, thereby creat- tion and weakened by time decay and inter-
ing novel configurations that describe the ference, our model explained findings from
information. our experiments on fact learning and retrieval.
Significantly, our model was extendable so
Tests of HAM. We tested our theory by it could encompass many traditional find-
providing college students with many inter- ings of the experimental literature on human
related facts about people in a small town. learning.
They would read, for example, that “The Part of our goal was to recast the labora-
town mayor owns a local restaurant” and “The tory findings from memory research to re-
town sheriff drives a white Chevy.” The HAM late them to novel ideas about knowledge
theory was written as a computer simulation representation coming out of AI. These AI
model. Anderson programmed a language topics included perceptual pattern recogni-
parser that would take such typed sentences tion, propositional analysis of knowledge, se-
into its short-term memory and set up simple mantic memory, labeled associative networks,
associative structures. As each fact was read, retrieval by fitting a question to a content-
we supposed that subjects (as did the com- addressable structure stored in memory, and
puter program) performed three tasks: (a) es- answering questions by using a collection of
tablished a new unit in memory for the config- specific strategies. Importantly, we demon-
uration of underlying propositions describing strated how to move laboratory research on
the fact or episode; (b) composed these propo- memory away from its traditional lists of non-
sitions by creating new instances, or tokens, of sense syllables and unrelated words toward
pre-existing concepts that already had been more realistic materials, including coherent
stored in the person’s (and computer’s) mem- text.
ory; and (c) linked them together in a pattern Anderson later developed HAM into a far
of subject-predicate structures. These labeled more powerful theory and simulation system.
associations enabled the simulated system to He introduced, for example, the important
answer questions about who was doing what idea of “productions”: the learned routines
to whom, when, and where. Because the sys- that move the cognitive system from one sub-
tem used familiar concepts (Chevy, sheriff ), task to another as it works on a larger prob-
the new fact could be combined with pre- lem. Refinements of this production system,
existing knowledge that enabled the simula- along with the labeled associative network and
tion to draw simple inferences, such as infer- improvements in the perceptual front end of
ring that the person who enforces the law in the system, enabled Anderson and his asso-
town drives a white car. ciates to develop cognitive psychology’s most

powerful and successful theoretical system causes of purposive actions, and simple rules
(Anderson & Lebiere 1998). It is a major of social reciprocity. This homogeneity of
achievement. I am proud to have contributed subjects’ knowledge eliminates what would
to its origins in the early 1970s. otherwise be a major source of variability in
experimental data. Second, reading, remem-
bering, and summarizing narratives are famil-
MOVING UP TO COHERENT iar cognitive tasks for most literate people.
TEXT Moreover, researchers using simple narratives
Anderson and I had addressed such prototypic as experimental materials can carefully con-
“memory experiment” materials as single ex- struct variations in texts to create controlled
periences (unrelated word lists) and single comparisons and to isolate specific compo-
sentences (and their underlying propositions). nents of the comprehension process. In short,
Yet we understood that cognitive psychol- narrative understanding offers an excellent ex-
ogy had a long way to go before it could perimental test tube within which to study
model the understanding of, and memory for, general aspects of people’s understanding and
such coherent prose as a simple story or his- memory.
tory lesson. Prose has properties that greatly
transcend collections of unrelated or scram-
bled sentences. In meaningful prose, succes- Story Grammars
sive sentences are connected by a variety of Our early efforts, as with many research ven-
coherence principles. For example, successive tures, followed other work in the area. After
sentences should carry forward somewhat the a few minor studies of text memory (Bower
same topic (concepts) and introduce new facts 1974, 1978), my student, Perry Thorndyke,
about it in a multilayered, interwoven way and I became attracted to the story-grammar
(Fletcher et al. 1996). Impressed by the pi- approach to understanding (Bower 1976,
oneering theories of Walter Kintsch (1974), Thorndyke 1977). Simple stories and folk-
Roger Schank (1975b), and David Rumelhart tales contain such recurring components as
(1975), my students and I began investigations a setting, characters, a theme (main goal), a
of narrative comprehension and memory. De- plot, episodes, and a resolution. Colby (1973)
spite my primary interest in memory, I knew and Rumelhart (1975) even conjectured that
text comprehension had to be studied as well, there might be something like a context-free
because it is a major determinant of what peo- story grammar. That is, some rewrite rules
ple remember from a text. would specify how large narrative compo-
nents would be expressed in terms of smaller
constituents or terminal elements. For exam-
Why Study Narrative Understanding ple, a narrative consists of a setting, a theme,
and Memory? episodes, and an outcome. The setting in turn
Although there are many types of prose, psy- can be rewritten as a list of characters and
chologists began to focus on the study of nar- places. The theme is one or more goals, and
ratives and story understanding in the 1980s. an episode is made up of characters’ actions
Several reasons led to this common interest. in a setting that yields outcomes. Those out-
First, understanding of any text depends crit- comes, in turn, may establish new narrative
ically on the reader’s expertise regarding the subgoals. Rumelhart proposed that readers
topic under discussion. Most adults already use this framework to interpret, understand,
possess the requisite common knowledge of and recall simple problem-solving stories.
human affairs required to understand sim- Our early research showed that adults not
ple stories and folktales. For example, most only prefer stories that follow the canoni-
adults understand basic human motives, goals, cal grammar but also recall them far better
8 Bower
than they do randomly scrambled sentences reflect their pre-existent knowledge and be-
(Bower 1976, Thorndyke 1977). A crucial el- liefs. These shortcomings of the story gram-
ement for recall is the overall goal of the mar approach led researchers to the study of
protagonist. If no overall goal is expressed the conceptual meaning of narrative events,
or strongly implied, comprehension and re- which provides a far richer lode to be mined.
call plummet. Comprehension also suffers if
subgoals, actions, and outcomes are spread
out and misaligned over different episodes of Consensus View of Event
the story. Furthermore, when summarizing Understanding
a story, people typically recite the “higher” Dating from van Dijk & Kintsch (1983), re-
units of the grammatical hierarchy by nam- searchers have developed the consensus that
ing the main characters, main setting, main as people read or hear a story about events,
goal, and main outcome. In other words, as a cascade of different cognitive processes go
the grammar expected, people recall the es- on in parallel, building multilevel representa-
sential gist of the story, while letting go of tions of the information. First, readers take in
lesser details. Kintsch (1974) similarly found the surface structure of the printed (or spoken)
that people recall the main points (generaliza- sentences and hold it in their working memory
tions) rather than finer details of expository for several seconds. From this surface struc-
text. This and other research (e.g., Mandler ture, they extract a propositional text base
& Johnson 1977, Stein 1988) established that containing the logical relations between the
people in our culture acquire and use a schema concepts and the predicates stated in the text.
that allows them to identify the principal el- Finally, a referential representation of what
ements of a well-formed narrative and how the text is about is constructed. This situa-
these elements are structured. This schema tion model or a mental model (Bower 1989,
also guides their later recall of the narrative. Johnson-Laird 1983, Zwaan & Radvansky
But story grammars had their shortcom- 1998) is not the text itself but rather is what
ings. A first shortcoming is that story gram- the text refers to. In some respects, the sit-
mars only specified abstract components (e.g., uation model is like a mental image of the
settings, goals) but said nothing about what story’s settings and actions that the reader
kinds of content would fill those components. constructs and modifies based on clues in the
Yet, it is the content that makes any story context. In other respects, however, the model dif-
crete and interesting. A second shortcoming, fers from an image. It contains, for example,
in violation of proposed context-free story hidden information that would not be visi-
grammar rules, is the many constraints and ble in an image, such as characters’ motives,
relations among the elements that fill the con- thoughts, and hidden weapons.
stituents of a typical narrative. For example, The situational model includes mental to-
the main goal must be that of the main char- kens corresponding to the characters men-
acter. His or her actions must be plausible tioned in the text, the approximate locations
within the context of the story and relevant and arrays of objects in the scenes, the goal and
to those goals. And the final outcome must be actions taken by the characters, events, and so
related to the initial goal. A third shortcoming on. A situation model is constructed by con-
is that the early story grammars ignored the necting the concepts that are in the text to the
critical role that the readers’ inferences play real world or some imaginary world referents.
in understanding—the grammar applies only Situation models draw upon the schematic
to the surface sentences of the text. Yet, many knowledge the reader already has about the
important elements of a text are implied rather general situation that the text describes. This
than stated explicitly. The inferences that peo- dependence acknowledges the role of exper-
ple draw from events in a story (or in real life) tise in understanding particular topics.

Theorists of situation models (as articu- plain the character’s motives and actions. In
lated by Zwaan et al. 1995) have hypothesized this way, readers connect new narrative events
that the more significant attributes or dimen- to earlier goals or actions in the text. Readers
sions of story situations include variations in build a network of causal connections among
story time, space, the current actor, his goals, the events of the story—going from some ini-
emotions, and important causal relationships tiating event (for example, the sheriff learns
between events. What makes a text coherent is that rustlers have stolen cattle) through the
a high degree of overlap or constancy of these various goals, subgoals, and actions of the
attributes from one clause to the next. Major main character (the sheriff chases them), over-
changes in any of these attributes usually cause coming obstacles (they hide and ambush him),
readers to update their current model. Re- and arriving at some final resolution (he cap-
search has shown that the greater the number tures the rustlers and retrieves the cattle).
of these attributes that are changed from one Readers consider events along this main
sentence to the next, the greater the updating causal chain to be the most significant parts
that must occur, and the more time readers of a story (Schank 1975b, Schank & Abelson
take to read and process those changes. 1977). Tom Trabasso and his associates (Suh
& Trabasso 1993, Trabasso & Sperry 1985,
Trabasso & Suh 1993, Trabasso & van den
Causal Analyses of Motives, Actions, Broek 1985) analyzed many simple narratives,
and Outcomes asking whether each event (described in a
A major clue about a situational change story statement) was enabled or caused by ear-
is a change in the characters’ goals—their lier events or whether it enables or causes
achievement, frustration, or failure. There- later events. In a coherent story, the enabling
fore, I moved my research increasingly from events and causes form a web of connections.
full-blown stories to concentrate on how peo- The importance of a statement in a story
ple recognize and understand characters’ mo- turns out to be determined by its number
tives, plans, and actions (Black & Bower 1980; of connections. This connectivity is what de-
Bower 1978, 1983; Foss & Bower 1986). The termines the likelihood that readers will re-
causal linkages among these elements heav- call a given statement (or the event that it
ily influence a reader’s representation of the describes) or will include it when summariz-
meaning of the narrative. Tracking a reader’s ing the story. This causal analysis replaces the
understanding of characters’ plans and goals empty platitude that readers recall the gist of a
has been the focus of research on causal story (Bartlett 1932)—a statement that is use-
analysis of narratives (Black & Bower 1980, less until we know what determines the gist.
Schank & Abelson 1977, Trabasso & Sperry Causal connectivity, based simply on analysis
1985). of the text itself, is an excellent predictor of
Most simple stories introduce a main char- what readers consider the gist of a narrative.
acter who has a complicated problem to solve.
The story describes the character’s actions to
overcome obstacles to achieve the solution. Goal-Based Explanations
Readers assume that the character’s actions Because character goals are the most impor-
can be explained by his goals as played out tant causes of character actions, my associates
within the constraints of the situation. While and I investigated how readers search in mem-
frustration of a goal may prompt the charac- ory for goals to explain actions. For example,
ter to abandon it, more often he responds by plans and actions for achieving goals range
establishing subgoals that, once conquered, from the well trod to the unexpected. We
pave the way to achieving the principal goal. showed that when the number of subgoal
Readers use everyday psychology to try to ex- inferences required to connect a character’s
10 Bower
action to his or her primary goal increases, it not see it by looking to the south. O’Brien &
takes readers longer to comprehend the action Albrecht (1992) have used detection of such
in question (Foss & Bower 1986). Thus, we inconsistencies to measure the accessibility of
understand immediately why a hungry man spatial information. A major narrative change
eats a pizza. But it takes an extra step—and in spatial location often flags the start of a
moment—to deduce why he might open the new episode, signaling readers that the cur-
yellow pages of the phone book. We also rent model must be updated to incorporate
know that in stories involving conflict, read- the change. For example, the sentence “Mean-
ers attribute competence and noble motives to while, back at the ranch, the outlaws. . .” sig-
characters with whom they identify, whereas nals a location change and a likely change in
they attribute negative traits to their adver- the current actor(s).
saries. Moreover, their later recollections of- Not every story requires a detailed spatial
ten contain distortions that justify these attri- situation. A sketchy default location often suf-
butions (Bower 1978). fices. For example, stories beginning “There

Readers establish a goal list in memory was once an old king who lived in a beauti-
for each character and monitor how story ful castle. . .” rarely provide details about the
events relate to those goals. Along the way, castle or where in the world it is located be-
the character may add a goal, move closer cause such details may be irrelevant to the
to completing a goal, drop a completed goal, character’s pursuit of his goals. Readers pay
or abandon a frustrated (unachievable) goal. little attention to, and do not encode, detailed
The more independent goals the character setting information unless or until it becomes
is juggling simultaneously, the longer it takes relevant to the actions of the story. Black &
readers to understand the character’s actions. Bower (1982) showed that setting information
We hypothesize that as each action occurs, is best remembered when it causally relates to,
the reader scans that actor’s goal list, taking or enables, later significant plot actions. For
more time to find one that explains that action. example, an earlier description of a telephone
The extra time readers take to sort through in an office becomes relevant and memorable
a character’s multiple goals is shortened if if the character later has to telephone to report
the character’s action satisfies several goals si- a crime.
multaneously (Sharkey & Bower 1984, 1987). Similarly, changes in spatial attributes of
Studies of goal monitoring and action expla- the scene do not routinely cause situational
nation reveal much about how people com- shifts unless they are both large and relevant
prehend actions in stories as well as in real to ongoing actions (Zwaan & van Oostendorp
life. 1993). When spatial location is relevant to
ongoing actions, readers carefully track the
locations of the main character and critical
The Spatial Dimension objects. This point was demonstrated by
An important dimension of the situational Sundermeier et al. (2005). They found that
model is the spatial location where significant objects and spatial locations were kept acces-
story events take place. This spatial informa- sible in a reader’s model and were reactivated
tion may include a mental map of the story’s if the current action or outcome hinged upon
places, landmarks, and objects as they are laid that information.
out in space, as well as the locations of the
characters as they move about. Furthermore,
to be coherent, the description of the spa- FOCUS AND UPDATING
tial layout and of the characters’ movements WITHIN SITUATION MODELS
should be consistent. If a tower is said to be As readers take in successive clauses of a story,
north of Bill’s current location, then he can- they update their current model, making some

elements more active in memory even as they the car and up to the house; its windows were
drop other entities that had been active previ- dirty.” Most people assume that the house, not
ously. This updating process is controlled by the car, had dirty windows because the narra-
what readers deem significant to a story’s plot. tive locates John near the house now.
A convenient way to study this updating of sit-
uational models is by observing how readers
track the changing locations of the main char- Paradigm for Studying Spatial
acter. This especially holds true when the lo- Priming
cation is relevant to the main character’s goal To study the role of focus in updating, we fa-
and likely actions. The remainder of this chap- miliarized our college student with a map or
ter summarizes what colleagues and I have floor plan of the spatial layout of a building
found about updating caused by changes in to which later experimental stories would re-
the character’s location. fer (Morrow et al. 1987). The memorized map
Readers focus on that part of their situ- would serve as the long-term memory base for
ational model where a significant change oc- the later stories. Across different experiments,
curs, which implies that they typically focus on we varied the floor plan as well as the sto-
the main character, his goal, and movements. ries and test items to measure the influence of
This moment-by-moment tracking defines several variables on the accessibility of differ-
the “here and now” point in the progress of the ent objects in the situational model. Figure 1
narrative. Linguists, who call this focal point shows an example map used in some of our
the deictic center, refer to items in the focus as experiments.
being foregrounded in the reader’s conscious- Our standard experiments had college stu-
ness. Psychologists think of focus as a partic- dents memorize a map and then read 10
ularly active portion of the current model in to 20 brief stories that were each about 20
the reader’s working memory. Language pro- lines long. Each story introduced a new char-
vides many ways to shift this focus to a new acter whose goal required him or her to
person, place, time, or topic. This is often move around the previously mapped build-
done explicitly, as in “Later, inside the bank ing. These stories described the characters’
vault, Jack worked furiously to crack the safe.” thoughts, plans, and actions as they moved
Once mentioned, this new person and place between rooms. For example, in one story a
moves to the foreground until another shift is research lab manager, Wilbur, is assigned the
introduced. goal of cleaning up lab rooms for an upcoming
In research I started with postdoctoral inspection by the Board of Directors. In an-
students Dan Morrow and Steve Greenspan other story, a security officer named Jack has
and further advanced with Mike Rinck, we to search throughout the building for a bur-
explored the psychological consequences of glar who reportedly broke into the building.
such shifts of focus. We hypothesized that Participants read the stories at a computer ter-
memory-representations of focused objects minal, presenting them line-by-line at their
are highly activated. If so, they would be own pace, and their reading times per sen-
readily accessible for answering questions tence were recorded.
about them. This increased accessibility re- The focus hypothesis directs interest to the
flects nonconscious activation of memory- movement sentences, such as “Wilbur walked
representations of objects near the focus. As from the Reception Room into the Library.”
one implication, Morrow (1985) found that Following linguists’ conventions, the place
items near the current focus (i.e., the current the character just left is called the Source room
actor in a story) are likely to be selected as the and the place he just entered is called the
referent for ambiguous pronouns. Consider, Goal (or Current Location) room. As charac-
for example, the sentence “John walked past ters moved about, we measured how quickly
12 Bower
Xerox Magazine
Machine
Tool Storage
Roses Rack Laundry
Bin
Reception Experiment Repair Wash

Room Lounge
Room Shop Room
Fed-Ex
Drop Off Mirror
Vending
VCR Machine Camcorder
Computer Bed
Figure 1
Telephone Safety
Office Cabinet Example of a
Stamps building layout
Folder studied by
Storage participants in our
Library Laboratory experiments. The
Coffee Room
Machine number and location
of objects as well as
Conference
the room layouts
Room
Radio Broom were varied across
Staff Mail Boxes Thermometers different
experiments.
subjects remembered from memory places We rewarded subjects for accuracy; those who
and objects that were temporally or spatially were too inaccurate on the questions were
near their focus of attention. To this end, af- replaced.
ter self-paced reading of a movement sen- The following sections summarize what
tence, readers were occasionally interrupted we have learned by considering spatial prim-
and given a probe test. The probes required ing as a window on readers’ updating of their
subjects to quickly answer either a yes/no situation model (for other reviews, see Bower
question about the location of an object or & Morrow 1990, Bower & Rinck 1999, Rinck
whether or not two objects were located in the & Bower 2003).
same room. The correct answer to a random
half of the questions was “yes,” while “no” was
the correct answer to the rest. Our interest The Basic Distance-Effect
centered on the “yes” probes. To increase ob- We hypothesized that memory activation
servation samples, each story contained three would be greatest for objects in the loca-
or four such interruptions. To ensure that tion currently in focus (where the protagonist
readers consistently tracked the current loca- is now) with activation diminishing the fur-
tion of the main character, occasional ques- ther the object was from the focus. We found
tions tested subjects’ knowledge of his or her this distance-effect in our first experiments, in
current location. After indicating their deci- which subjects learned the floor plans of two
sion (with a yes or no key press), subjects con- buildings: a lab and a storage barn (Morrow
tinued reading the story until the next inter- et al. 1987, 1989). Probe tests given after a
ruption or the end of the story. To encourage movement sentence clocked the fastest re-
good comprehension, each story concluded trieval speeds for the current Location room,
with two or three yes/no questions about it. followed by the Source room, and then by

more distant Other rooms in the building the ers could split their attention between both
current story was about. The slowest retrieval characters, but the main character continued
speeds involved probe tests about objects from to command more of their attention.
the other building not mentioned in the cur-
rent story. The Other room was presumably
faster than objects from the other building Intermediate Locations
because it had been activated by mention of We found that intermediate landmarks along
the current building and sometimes by the an implied path were activated somewhat by
character having been there earlier during his the character passing through their room.
tour of the building. Objects in the room Critical motion sentences in this experiment
farther along the path in the direction just took such forms as, “Wilbur walked from
ahead of the character’s current location had a room A into room C.” In this case, the mem-
level of activation (retrieval speed) that fell be- orized map made clear to the reader that
tween that of the Source room and the Other Wilbur would have to pass through an inter-
room. mediate room, B, when walking from room
Our initial experiments also ruled out two A to C. We found that retrieval speeds were
extraneous factors: (a) The same distance ef- fastest for items in the Goal room, C; next
fect arose regardless of whether the move- fastest for those in the intermediate (Path)
ment sentence mentioned the Source room room, B; next for objects in the Source room,
before or after the Location room; and (b) an A; and slowest for objects in some Other,
incidental mention of a room that the char- more distant room that had not been acti-
acter does not enter or think about results in vated by the sentence just read. We presume
negligible activation. An example might be, that this gradient arises because readers men-
“Wilbur went into his office to review the tally simulate the character’s imagined move-
messages that had been sent over earlier from ment as he passed—and briefly activated—
the reception room.” Such a sentence activates objects in the implied Path room. This Path
objects in the office but not in the reception room activation immediately begins to de-
room. cay as soon as the character enters the Goal
room. Significantly, the implied Path room
caused greater activation than the explicitly
Major Versus Minor Characters mentioned Source room. I present a theory
If the main character recruits a minor charac- below that accounts for this intermediate-path
ter to help achieve his goal, readers continue effect.
to focus more attention on the major char-
acter. In tests for this effect, the narratives in-
cluded several critical sentences that described Mental Location
the movements of the two characters. A story We have also found that the most activated
might relate that Wilbur (major character) location is the place that the character is cur-
went into room A, while John (minor) went rently thinking about, which is not neces-
into room B, or it might reverse the order sarily where he is currently located. After a
of the two clauses. A test probe followed such movement sentence, the critical sentence de-
sentences, naming the major or minor charac- scribed the character thinking about an activ-
ter plus an object from the building. Subjects ity in another room, e.g., remembering that
had to decide whether the probed character he had to paint its walls or sand its floors.
was in the same room as the object. We found Test probes showed that readers accessed un-
that questions about the major character were mentioned objects in the thought-about room
answered more quickly than were those about more quickly than those in the current lo-
the minor character. This suggested that read- cation room. In fact, when the character’s
14 Bower
thoughts were elsewhere, subjects’ access to tion. The vignettes then introduce a second
objects in the Location room was only slightly character who is walking in the same direc-
faster than to objects from some distant Other tion as the first character or in the opposite
room. Apparently, readers track the thoughts direction (that is, they are approaching one
of the character more than his physical another). Probe questions then asked read-
location. ers to quickly identify where a landmark was
This mental-location advantage would (ahead, behind, left, right) relative to one of
probably be reversed if readers know that the the characters. Responses were slower for left-
character’s physical location at the moment right rather than for ahead-behind judgments,
is more important than his present thought- slower for questions about the character not
location, for example, if he is sitting on a currently in focus, and much slower when the
ticking time bomb about to explode as he is orientations of the two characters were oppo-
thinking about another place. The underly- site rather than congruent. This research in-
ing principle in such examples is that readers dicated that readers construct and view their
focus on places where they expect significant situation model from a particular perspective
events to occur that will either advance or foil and orientation (see also Taylor & Tversky
the protagonist’s goals. Here again, fate of the 1996).
character’s goal is a major determinant of what
readers identify as the crux of a story.
Distance Effects in Anaphor
Resolution
Objects Accompanying the Main A criticism of the map-then-story procedure
Character is that it overemphasizes spatial information
Consistent with these distance effects, (learning the map and then answering spatial
Glenberg et al. (1987) showed that men- questions), a process that might prompt sub-
tioned objects carried by the main character jects to read unnaturally. Perhaps readers do
as he moves around are relatively accessible not normally pay so much attention to spa-
for as long as this character is in focus. tial information (Zwaan & van Oostendorp
Their vignettes introduced a character and 1993). In response, Mike Rinck and I (Rinck
mentioned an object that he either took with & Bower 1995) conducted experiments that
him on a walk or left behind. They found assessed focus effects without using any inter-
that after an intervening sentence or two, the rupting location probes. Instead, we simply
object the character carried with him was measured the time subjects took to read a tar-
more accessible for recognition memory and get sentence that contained an anaphor (such
for pronoun resolution than was the object definite noun phrases as “the telephone”) that
left behind. referred to an object in one of the rooms of
a building. Having just moved from a Source
into a Goal room, the character thought about
Spatial Perspective Within the (or remembered, planned, envisioned, etc.)
Situation doing something with a critical object in an-
The situation model of readers mirrors the other room, e.g., “Wilbur remembered that
main character’s perspective. Consequently, he should check the VCR in the experiment
readers answer questions best from the char- room.” We found that the further the ob-
acter’s vantage point. DeVega (1994) had subject (in this case, the VCR) was from the fo-
jects memorize locations of four buildings, cus on the character’s location, the longer it
such as around a town square. They then took subjects merely to read the anaphor sen-
read vignettes about a main character walk- tence. Moreover, the reading time per sylla-
ing through the square in a specific direc- ble was quickened when the anaphor sentence

specifically mentioned the room where the As predicted, subjects took more time to
critical object was located (in the just-cited read the ambiguous anaphor (the table) when
example, the target sentence reminds read- it preceded (rather than followed) the specific
ers that the VCR is in the experiment room). room name in the sentence. Subjects also took
The extra room cue presumably saves sub- longer to read the anaphor when there were
jects the time that they otherwise would ex- more examples of the mentioned category
pend retrieving which room contains the ob- (e.g., tables) in different rooms. The time
ject in question. This is a familiar result in they took to read the room name reflected the
memory retrieval: Two converging cues elicit usual distance-from-focus effect. In contrast,
a satisfactory answer more readily than ei- the increased reading time associated with
ther cue alone. The important result is that increasing the number of instances of the
subjects reading “naturally” are showing the object anaphor (from one to three to five
distance-from-focus effect even though they tables) was considerably offset when the room
are not being interrupted to answer location name preceded the anaphor. In these cases,
questions. the room name clearly flags which table is
being discussed, thereby reducing competing
claims on memory retrieval. These results
Interference in Resolving Ambiguous confirm the earlier finding that “natural”
Anaphors readers who are not interrupted by location
If anaphor resolution involves memory re- questions nonetheless show the distance-
trieval, then it should be slowed by associa- from-focus effect. They also show how
tive interference. If, for example, “the table” interference slows anaphor resolution. In
could refer to any one of several tables scat- addition, the results support the “immediacy”
tered throughout several rooms in the build- assumption ( Just & Carpenter 1992), which
ing, readers should read it faster if they are told posits that readers immediately attempt to
the room-location of the mentioned table. identify the referent for each anaphor as they
Otherwise, readers are left in limbo, await- encounter it in a sentence.
ing information that is more specific. In our
experiment, subjects memorized a map that
contained one, three, or five different exam- What’s the Distance Metric?
ple objects such as tables, chairs, and comput- We wondered if the distance-from-focus
ers, distributed throughout different rooms effect should be measured by a Euclidean
in a building (Bower & Rinck 2001). Next, metric (in a straight line as the crow flies)
they read stories that moved the character into or by route distance: the number of rooms
a specific room (e.g., the Reception room), or spatial segments separating the focus
and then they read critical sentences such from the mentioned object. In experiments
as “Sally remembers having had her lecture by Rinck et al. (1997), these two types of
notes while she was standing at the table in the distance were varied independently. The
library.” The alternate rendering reversed the memorized maps allowed the stories and
final noun phrases, e.g., while she was stand- test-probes to put either a long or a short
ing “in the library at the table.” Precise mea- metric distance between the current focus
surements of the time subjects took to read and the referent object. Additionally, this
the critical anaphor (i.e., the table) were ob- distance either was divided into two rooms
tained by having subjects press the space bar or was left as an undivided room. Following a
to read each successive word on the computer movement across this distance, the character
screen. This method, known as “rapid serial thought about an object along the path. This
visual presentation,” is often used in reading object was either metrically near or far from
research. the focus room, and that distance either was
16 Bower
divided into two rooms or was not. The Learning a Spatial Layout from a
dependent variables were the time subjects Verbal Description
took to read the movement sentence itself and
Spatial distance effects do not depend upon
the “think about” object-anaphor sentence.
learning layouts from a map. Similar dis-
The experiment produced several clear re-
tance effects occur when subjects learn spa-
sults. Overall, the primary determinant of
tial arrangements of rooms and objects from
reading time was the route (room) distance,
detailed verbal descriptions. Relying exclu-
and not the Euclidean metric distance. Sub-
sively on verbal descriptions, our subjects
jects took longer to read the movement sen-
memorized a rectangular preschool with five
tence when its path traversed two rooms
rooms (Rinck et al. 1996). Each room had two
rather than one, whereas room length had
doors leading to adjacent rooms and a third

no effect on reading time. Also, the reading
door opening into a common inner court-
time for the anaphor in the thought-about
yard. The rooms contained common school
object sentence increased dramatically when

objects and each room was named for the
the path was divided into two rooms com-
teacher (e.g., Ms. Hill’s room). The verbal
pared to one. Here again, the metric length
descriptions also located the rooms relative
of this room (or rooms) was immaterial. Read-
to the outer shell of the building. Subjects
ers’ references to an object on the other side
were not allowed to physically draw maps
of a shared wall (a minimal metric distance),
of the building (although most undoubtedly
for example, required no more reading time
constructed mental images of its presumed
than references to an object on the other side
layout).
of the building (a long metric distance). Al-
Compared to our earlier physical map
though room segments had a major impact on
learners, those relying just on verbal descrip-
reading, metric distances had no measurable
tions took far longer to memorize the spa-
impact.
tial layout. They also later read the sto-
What is odd about this finding is that we
ries slightly slower. Nonetheless, during the
know that subjects had recorded metric in-
standard story reading following map learn-
formation in memory. When asked to draw
ing, the distance gradient for the retrieval
maps from memory of the rooms and their ob-
of probed objects remained orderly and sig-
jects, they do a reasonably good job of repro-
nificant across both groups. Regardless of
ducing relative locations and distances. Yet,
whether subjects had learned from physical
in our reading task, they skipped from one
maps or verbal descriptions, their retrieval
landmark to another without regard for met-
speeds were fastest for objects in the Goal
ric distances. Why? A plausible answer is that
room, followed by those in the Path room,
they do not need to keep metric information
then those in the Source room, and finally
active while reading since they are never asked
were slowest for objects found in some Other
questions about it, so it remains inactive. I pre-
room.
sumed that if subjects were required to pay
Whether or not memory for the spatial ar-
attention to metric distances in order to an-
ray is identical for map learners and verbal-
swer relevant questions (i.e., “Is object A or
description learners, we note that the dis-
B metrically closer to the character now?”),
tance effects in both cases appear to reflect
then their reaction times would show metric
the connectivity structures among rooms that
distance effects, e.g., two objects close to the
both types of subjects memorized. Similarly,
focus would lead to faster decisions than two
Taylor & Tversky (1992) found that subjects
objects far from the focus. This leaves open
who studied maps and those receiving verbal
the question of whether such metric influ-
descriptions of maps performed comparably
ences would then appear in readers’ anaphor
on tests of spatial knowledge.
look-up times.

Using Prelearned Spatial Arrays and then writing stories about characters
moving around in those spaces. Trail and I
To insure homogeneity of spatial knowledge,
tried using our own university campus as the
subjects in the foregoing experiments mem-
known spatial array. But we abandoned this
orized a map of a unique space in which the
approach after discovering surprisingly large
story events take place. Some evidence sug-
variation in students’ knowledge of different
gests that a distance effect occurs when the
campus spots (such as dorms, lecture halls, and
stories refer to a spatial layout that is already
eateries).
familiar to subjects before they show up to
participate in the experiment. In pilot work,
my student, Saskia Trail, found a small but sig-
Elapsed Story Time
nificant distance effect for subjects who read

many stories about characters driving long Once a character leaves one place and enters
distances between major United States cities, another, distinct space, we hypothesize that
pursuing a goal such as delivering furniture or activation on the initial place decays as its rel-
selling encyclopedias to libraries. The critical evance to the character recedes into the past.
sentences had the character drive from one This decay process turns out to be determined
city to another (e.g., San Diego to Miami). by the lapse of time spelled out in the story, not
In the destination city, he would think about the real time that passes as subjects read inter-
some activity (e.g., spending his bonus pay) in vening sentences before they hit an anaphor
the current Location city (Miami), the Source referring back to the original location.
city (San Diego), or a city along the just- Rinck et al. (2000) investigated this ques-
completed driving Path (e.g., New Orleans). tion in experiments that built on the work of
Trail measured how quickly subjects, who Rolf Zwann (1996). Our movement sentences
were never shown a map, read those criti- moved the story character from a Source room
cal “thinking” sentences depending on which through a Path room into a Goal room. Sig-
city the character was thinking about. These nificantly, he carries out an activity in the
anaphor reading times showed the usual dis- Goal room that alternately is described as tak-
tance gradient, with reading time for Path ing either a short time (e.g., two minutes)
cities being intermediate between the times or a long time (e.g., two hours). In addition,
for the shorter Goal city and the longer Source we varied the number of intervening sen-
city. In an unforeseen complication to her ex- tences separating the movement event from
periment, Trail found that her college sub- the elapsed story-time statement, following
jects’ pre-existent map knowledge often was which we presented the probe test. The probe
fuzzy and imprecise. Morrow et al. (2004) measured the accessibility of an object in the
did a more substantial follow-up study that Path room. For example, Wilbur walks from
found that senior citizens showed a more ro- room A (through room B) into room C, where
bust “city-distance” effect in anaphor read- he notices that room C needs to be cleaned up.
ing times than did young people. The au- This action was followed by zero or five sen-
thors suggested that the weaker effect for tences elaborating on the activity in room C
younger subjects might have resulted from before the critical time-lapse sentence stated
their poorer knowledge of geographic loca- that Wilbur took either two minutes or two
tions of the cities in the stories. hours to clean up room C. We probe-tested
Clearly, more research is needed regarding the subject, asking about an object in either
distance effects with familiar arrays. One lo- Path room B or Goal room C. If elapsed story
gistical challenge is identifying highly famil- time is critical for deactivation of earlier enti-
iar spatial arrays (such as floor plans, towns, ties, then objects in the Path room will have
or campuses) for a large sample of subjects notably less activation after a stated two-hour
18 Bower
cleanup than a cleanup said to take just two food items and their associated places in the
minutes. building should be activated in the readers’
The results in this experiment were strik- mind.
ing: The elapsed story time caused a large In our goal-activation experiments (Rinck
and consistent slowing of object retrieval time, & Bower 1999, 2003), each story tested sev-
whereas actual elapsed reading time (deter- eral goal-related probes by introducing a mo-
mined by the zero versus five intervening mentary, minor goal that temporarily inter-
sentences) had virtually no effect. Retrieval rupts the character’s overarching main goal.
times for objects in the just-left room were For example, Wilbur’s main goal in one story
markedly slower following elapsed hours than was to clean up all the rooms in the research
elapsed minutes. This occurred even though building before tomorrow’s inspection by the
subjects took no longer to read the elapsed- board of directors. During this lengthy chore,
hours statements than the elapsed-minutes however, he has the apparently spontaneous
statements. Apparently, readers of the longer thought that he also needs to make copies of
(hours) verb-modifier deactivated Path-room a handout for his speech to the directors the
objects significantly more than did readers of next day. Once Wilbur addresses this momen-
the shorter (minutes) verb modifier. This in- tary copying goal and we have probed the ac-
hibition occurs very quickly given that the test cessibility of some related object, the narrative
probe immediately followed the subject’s self- returns Wilbur to his chief goal: cleaning up
paced reading of the elapsed time sentence. the building.
Such rapid suppression of activation has been At each critical point in the text, we intro-
a premise of several language-processing the- duced either of two momentary goals (such as
ories (Gernsbacher 1990). to make photocopies or to videotape his prac-
Although we found little effect resulting tice speech), followed by a probe referring to
from our manipulation of the number of inter- a goal-object probe that was either in the cur-
vening sentences, the maximum number we rent Location room or in the prior Source
tested was only five sentences. We would ex- room. We created four experimental condi-
pect a larger effect if this cap was pumped up tions: The goal-object probe in the Location
to hundreds of intervening sentences before or Source room was either relevant to the tem-
the test probe. However, this would introduce porary goal (for example, the Xerox machine
logistical and conceptual problems. Namely, is relevant to the copying goal) or it was irrel-
it is difficult to interject so many interven- evant because the object probe did not relate
ing sentences without introducing new topics, to the temporary goal (for example, although
subgoals, and episodes. These changes would Wilbur wanted to videotape, the probe tested
shift the situation away from the one that im- the location of the Xerox machine).
mediately follows the critical movement sen- This experiment revealed major ef-
tence. This shift, in and of itself, likely would fects of spatial distance and goal relevance
deaden accessibility related to the prior Path on memory-retrieval times. As expected,
room. Location-room probes always were answered
more quickly than Source-room probes. In-
dependently, probes of goal-relevant objects
Priming by a Momentary Active Goal were always answered more quickly than
Earlier we found that activation tracks the probes of goal-irrelevant objects. Signifi-
place that the character is thinking about as cantly, these two factors did not interact:
he plans to do something there. Readers can The speed-up advantage of goal-relevant over
predict what is on a character’s mind by know- goal-irrelevant probes was about the same for
ing his active goal (wish, desire, plan). Thus, objects in the Location room as for those in
if they read that the character is hungry, then the Source room.

Priming by Active, Completed, when it was in the current Location room

or Postponed Goals where the character had just used it. How-
ever, retrieval time for the completed goal-
The accessibility of goals and their relevant
object slowed to that of an object related to
objects vary throughout a story, reflecting
a postponed goal when the completed goal
their evolving status with the protagonist.
was in the just-preceding Source room. To
Earlier research has shown that a charac-
clarify this result, a second experiment var-
ter’s active, uncompleted goals remain more
ied the number of sentences (zero or three)
accessible than completed goals (Dopkins
between the goal-status sentence and presen-
et al. 1993, Lutz & Radvansky 1997, Suh &
tation of the probe test. The intervening three
Trabasso 1993). Presumably, a protagonist’s
sentences described the character’s return to
uncompleted goals are kept active in the

his overarching goal. In this experiment, we
reader’s working memory, as opposed to com-
replicated the previous results for active and
pleted goals, which fall victim either to pas-
postponed goals; furthermore, we found that

sive decay or by inhibition. Readers expect
the completed-goal condition yielded fast re-
that completed goals will no longer motivate
trieval when no sentences intervened before
the character and, therefore, will no longer be
the test probe, but much slower retrieval after
needed to explain the character’s later actions.
three intervening sentences.
Our experiments compared active and
The results suggest that readers may pro-
completed goals to a third type of goal,
cess postponed versus completed goals dif-
namely, those that the character briefly con-
ferently. The sudden drop in accessibility of
siders, but then postpones or abandons. Our
postponed-goal objects suggests that readers
postponement-narratives had the character
actively inhibit postponed goals and related
set aside the briefly considered goal due to his
objects. In contrast, the decrease in accessi-
pressing need to finish the overarching goal.
bility of completed-goal objects probably re-
We tested whether a mentioned but then post-
flects a gradual decay of activation (from zero
poned goal retains any more activation than a
to three intervening sentences).
completed goal. We modified the texts and
test probes of previous “goal” experiments to
include the postponed goal condition along A NETWORK EXPLANATION OF
with the active and completed goal condi- FINDINGS
tions. After introducing a momentary inter-
Activating Associative Networks in
rupting goal, the narrative then described it
Long-term Memory
as either active, completed, or postponed—
that is, considered briefly but rejected. Imme- I will invoke a familiar conceptual framework
diately thereafter, the probe-object test was to summarize our findings. First, consider the
presented. All probe objects were goal rele- long-term memory structure that our sub-
vant and located in either the current Loca- jects might use to represent the maps of
tion room or the preceding Source room. the experimental buildings. Following long-
The results showed strong main effects of standing conventions in AI (Anderson 1978,
goal status as well as spatial distance to the goal Kosslyn 1980, Pylyshyn 1973), the memo-
object. Specifically, subjects always retrieved rized map may be represented as a hierarchi-
objects relevant to the active goal fastest and cal tree structure containing units or nodes
always retrieved those related to the post- (denoting objects, rooms, buildings) with la-
poned goal the slowest. Retrieval time for beled links or associations (containment of
the completed goal-object varied with its spa- objects in rooms, paths between rooms, ge-
tial location: Subjects retrieved a completed ometric relationships, etc.). The upper part
goal-object as quickly as an active goal-object of Figure 2, labeled “Long-Term Memory,”
20 Bower
{Long-Term Memory}
Research Goal:
Center Make Copies
Figure 2
North An associative
East North
North
Middle
West
network in
long-term memory
encoding knowledge
Door Door Use Copy of the building’s
Repair Lounge Experiment
Shop Machine spatial layout.
Room
Conceptual units
(nodes) denote
rooms and objects,
Cam- Xerox
Magazine and links denote
corder Machine
Rack spatial relationships
Tool and connections.
Storage Vending VCR Working memory
Machine
(lower part) contains
the “Here-Now”
focus on the current
location, the
currently active
sentence, and a
spatial inference
from it. The unit
INFERENCE: representing the goal
TEXT: Location
of making
Walked [Wilbur,
Exp. Room] photocopies is also
[Wilbur, TEXT: shown in the right
From Repair Shop, INFERENCE: Goal
To Exp. Room] Walked-Through side of the figure.
[Wilbur,
[Wilbur, Lounge] Make Copies] Reproduced with
permission from
{Working Memory} Rinck & Bower
2003, Figure 8.
depicts part of such a hypothetical spatial en- linkages pass activation from working mem-
coding of several rooms, with each room con- ory to the units in the long-term memory
taining several objects. The rooms also have structure. An example would be to activate the
various access relations and locations relative proposition that the camcorder is in the repair
to one another (Bower & Rinck 1999). The shop. Below I discuss the goal-plan features on
bottom part of Figure 2, labeled “Working the right side of Figure 2.
Memory,” holds the most recent sentence the In this scheme, the focus of attention (or
subject has read and parsed into basic proposi- foregrounded concepts) zeroes in on currently
tions (such as “Wilbur walked from the Repair active concepts in working memory and their
Shop into the Experiment Room”). The the- counterparts in long-term memory. It also is
ory supposes that the concepts mentioned in the narrative’s here-and-now point. As the
this sentence are temporarily linked to their narrative flows, the concepts that are active
corresponding referents in long-term mem- evolve and change, as does the Here-and-
ory. This is depicted by dashed lines connect- Now pointer. In this network model, ques-
ing the working-memory concepts to their tions about object locations require the pro-
corresponding units in the hierarchy. These cessor to activate and retrieve propositions

from long-term memory, for example, “The walked through the Lounge,” which Figure 2
Experiment Room contains the Xerox ma- shows as now active in working memory. This
chine” (Collins & Loftus 1975). Because such inference activates the Lounge room concept
concepts have received spreading activation in memory, so that questions about its ob-
from the preceding movement sentences, they jects are answered more readily than objects
have a head-start advantage relative to enti- in other, more distant rooms. Likewise, once
ties more distant in the network, so the net- the story moves on to other rooms and top-
work can more readily retrieve them and an- ics, the activations of previously visited rooms
swer questions about them. The farther is the decay back to the baseline, losing their tempo-
queried room from the focus in the network, rary accessibility boost. As they read, subjects
the weaker the spread of activation and the create a dynamic wave of activation spreading
slower the time to retrieve information to an- across their network memory structure. This
swer questions. This property yields the basic wave’s surge creates peaks and valleys of acti-
categorical (“room”) distance gradient inde- vation (and accessibility) that sweeps across
pendently of the Euclidian metric distance. the concept units that track the character’s
These object-concepts now in the spot- current location, thoughts, and goals (see also
light (speaking metaphorically) are more ac- van Den Broek et al. 1998).
cessible for answering related questions than
are objects lying outside the spotlight. The
distance-from-focus gradient suggests two Explaining the Goal-Relevance Effect
possible metaphors. One features a fuzzy spot- As a second example, the effects of goal rele-
light that scatters light in a gradient around vance on accessibility can be explained by the
its center. The more peripheral an object is to associative network outlined in Figure 2. We
the center, the dimmer is its lighting, so the begin with the plausible assumption that read-
more time required for checking and verifying ers track the character’s active goals, retain-
an answer. An alternative metaphor invokes a ing them in working memory. Each familiar
sharply defined spotlight that must be swung goal is associated with plan structures in long-
from its current location to focus on a probed term memory that guide inferences about
object. The time for the spotlight to traverse instrumental objects typically used in those
the path in the model would be presumed plans. For instance, educated readers know
to reflect greater distances. Both metaphors that copy machines make photocopies, cam-
correspond to plausible models of attention corders make videotapes, and so on. Likely
focus. goal-related links between the “Make photo-
copies” plan units are depicted in the upper
right side of Figure 2.
Explaining the Intermediate-Room When a goal is active in working mem-
Effect ory, it presumably activates its correspond-
To illustrate the workings of the spatial net- ing goal-plan structure in long-term mem-
work model in Figure 2, consider how it ex- ory, which, in turn, activates associated
plains two of our results. Consider first the instruments—such as the copy machine in
intermediate-room result of an earlier exper- the preceding example. The activation of the
iment. We assume that the character’s move- goal-relevant object enhances the activation
ment from room A (Figure 2, Repair Shop) coming from the room location unit that
to C (Figure 2, Experiment Room) invokes a has also just been activated by its concept in
conscious or unconscious inference (via the working memory. We therefore expect reac-
network linkages) that the character passed tion time to be further reduced by the com-
through room B (Figure 2, Lounge). This in- bined relevance of the goal and location of
ference is reflected in the proposition “Wilbur focus. Moreover, activation caused by these
22 Bower
goal-based instrumental inferences should be focus follows the major character and tracks
kept aroused as long as the current goal is his location, goals, and thoughts. Readers’ re-
active. Yet, this elevated activation on this trieval of an anaphoric reference to an object is
goal should decay once this goal is completed slowed by their momentary uncertainty (e.g.,
and the character moves on to another goal which of several instances of a category is be-
and, perhaps, another location. On the other ing referred to). The enhanced accessibility of
hand, if the goal is abandoned or postponed, the current place or goal fades as the character,
then the goal activation is quickly and ac- and hence the focus, moves on to other places
tively inhibited, much as Gernsbacher (1990) and topics. This fading is quickened when the
suggested. text states that a long time has elapsed in the
In conclusion, this network model— story.
combined with some auxiliary assumptions Readers construct their situation mod-
about automatic inferences, goal activation, els from a given perspective and orienta-
and decay—readily accounts for the bulk of tion; questions about object locations are most
our experimental findings about memory ac- readily answered from that perspective. The
cess during narrative comprehension. More distance-from-focus effect arises when the
specifically, it appears to help explain fo- spatial layout is learned from a verbal descrip-
cus effects in spatial priming within situation tion as well as from a map. Some evidence sug-
models. gests that distance effects also arise for narra-
tive questions about familiar maps not studied
in the experiment.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING Explicit mention of a character’s goal in-
COMMENT creases the accessibility of objects relevant to
To summarize, I have argued that one goal that goal. This accessibility is highest when a
of reading research should be an understand- goal is being actively pursued, it fades soon af-
ing of how people process narratives and con- ter a goal is achieved, and is absent if a consid-
struct situation models from them. A major ered goal is abandoned. I proposed an associa-
factor in updating a situation model is how tive network model with retrieval determined
the text guides the reader’s momentary focus by spreading activation as a way of summariz-
of attention. The last part of this chapter has ing some of the major findings.
reviewed many results on how narrative focus The research described in this review is
changes or “primes” the accessibility of enti- a selected sample of topics my collaborators
ties in the situation model. This priming was and I have investigated throughout my ca-
examined using both subjects’ times to read an reer. I have had a stellar collection of gradu-
anaphor referring to an object and to answer ate and postgraduate students and colleagues
explicit questions about its location. who have contributed their ideas and experi-
The primary findings indicate that narra- mental labors to this research. Many of them
tive focus enhances accessibility of nearby ob- have gone on to illustrious research careers. I
jects in the model. The effect during reading consider them my lasting legacy to cognitive
appears determined not by Euclidean distance psychology, outweighing by far the findings
but by route distance from the focus. Readers’ summarized here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Parts of this chapter are adapted from the author’s autobiographical chapter in A History of
Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. 8, edited by G. Lindsey & W. Runyan, APA Books 2007, and
from Bower & Morrow (1990).

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AR331-FM ARI 15 November 2007 15:19
Annual Review of
Contents Psychology
Volume 59, 2008

Prefatory
The Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist: A Journey from Simple

Behaviors to Complex Mental Acts
Gordon H. Bower p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p1
Pharmacology and Behavior

Addiction and the Brain Antireward System
George F. Koob and Michel Le Moal p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 29
Consummatory Behavior
The Brain, Appetite, and Obesity
Hans-Rudolf Berthoud and Christopher Morrison p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 55
Sex
Neuroendocrine Regulation of Feminine Sexual Behavior: Lessons
from Rodent Models and Thoughts About Humans
Jeffrey D. Blaustein p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 93
Audition and Its Biological Bases

The Biological Basis of Audition
Gregg H. Recanzone and Mitchell L. Sutter p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p119
Color Perception
Color in Complex Scenes

Steven K. Shevell and Frederick A.A. Kingdom p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p143
Scene Perception, Event Perception, or Object Recognition
Visual Perception and the Statistical Properties of Natural Scenes

Wilson S. Geisler p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p167
v
Cognitive Processes
The Mind and Brain of Short-Term Memory
John Jonides, Richard L. Lewis, Derek Evan Nee, Cindy A. Lustig,
Marc G. Berman, and Katherine Sledge Moore p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p193
Memory
Relativity of Remembering: Why the Laws of Memory Vanished
Henry L. Roediger, III p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p225
Reasoning and Problem Solving

Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment,

and Social Cognition
Jonathan St. B.T. Evans p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p255
Comparative Psychology, Ethology, and Evolution

Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy
Frans B.M. de Waal p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p279
Anxiety Disorders
Social Bonds and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
Anthony Charuvastra and Marylène Cloitre p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p301
Inference, Person Perception, Attribution

Spontaneous Inferences, Implicit Impressions, and Implicit Theories
James S. Uleman, S. Adil Saribay, and Celia M. Gonzalez p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p329
Social Development, Social Personality, Social Motivation, Social Emotion

Motives of the Human Animal: Comprehending, Managing, and
Sharing Inner States
E. Tory Higgins and Thane S. Pittman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p361
Cognition in Organizations
Cognition in Organizations
Gerard P. Hodgkinson and Mark P. Healey p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p387
Selection and Placement

Personnel Selection
Paul R. Sackett and Filip Lievens p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p419
vi Contents
Education of Special Populations
The Education of Dyslexic Children from Childhood to Young Adulthood

Sally E. Shaywitz, Robin Morris, and Bennett A. Shaywitz p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p451
Health Promotion and Disease Prevention

Health Psychology: The Search for Pathways Between Behavior
and Health
Howard Leventhal, John Weinman, Elaine A. Leventhal, and L. Alison Phillips p p p p477
Emotion
Human Abilities: Emotional Intelligence
John D. Mayer, Richard D. Roberts, and Sigal G. Barsade p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p507
Data Analysis
Sample Size Planning for Statistical Power and Accuracy
in Parameter Estimation
Scott E. Maxwell, Ken Kelley, and Joseph R. Rausch p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p537
Timely Topics
A Comprehensive Review of the Placebo Effect: Recent Advances
and Current Thought
Donald D. Price, Damien G. Finniss, and Fabrizio Benedetti p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p565
Children’s Social Competence in Cultural Context
Xinyin Chen and Doran C. French p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p591
Grounded Cognition
Lawrence W. Barsalou p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p617
Neuroeconomics
George Loewenstein, Scott Rick, and Jonathan D. Cohen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p647
Indexes
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 49–59 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p673

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 49–59 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p678
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Psychology articles may be found at

http://psych.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml
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Copyright c 2008 by Annual Reviews. Abstract

Major Inﬂuences Toward Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 What’s the Distance Metric? . . . . . . 16

INTRODUCTION gression from simple animal conditioning ex-

premed courses. After my freshman year, I

theorist with a strong “animal learning”

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behavior of real subjects. My ﬁrst exposure to more complex information-processing mod-

information-processing model. Speciﬁcally, Organizational Factors in Memory

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 5

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 7

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 9

butions (Bower 1978). ﬁces. For example, stories beginning “There

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 11

Reception Experiment Repair Wash

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 13

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 15

doors leading to adjacent rooms and a third

object sentence increased dramatically when

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 17

niﬁcant distance effect for subjects who read

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 19

Priming by Active, Completed, when it was in the current Location room

uncompleted goals are kept active in the

postponed goals; furthermore, we found that

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www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 23

Bartlett FC. 1932. Remembering. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press

Chomsky N. 1959. Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language 35:26–58

cessing of narrative text. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 19:70–80

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 25

www.annualreviews.org • Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist 27

Volume 59, 2008

The Evolution of a Cognitive Psychologist: A Journey from Simple

Pharmacology and Behavior

Audition and Its Biological Bases

Color in Complex Scenes

Scene Perception, Event Perception, or Object Recognition

Visual Perception and the Statistical Properties of Natural Scenes

Reasoning and Problem Solving

Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment,

Comparative Psychology, Ethology, and Evolution

Inference, Person Perception, Attribution

Social Development, Social Personality, Social Motivation, Social Emotion

Selection and Placement

Education of Special Populations

The Education of Dyslexic Children from Childhood to Young Adulthood

Health Promotion and Disease Prevention

John D. Mayer, Richard D. Roberts, and Sigal G. Barsade p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p507

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 49–59 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p673

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Psychology articles may be found at

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