How readers’ lives affect narrative experiences

This chapter explores the claim that readers have unique experiences of narratives as a product of their accumulated memories-memories of their own life events as well as the knowledge they have acquired through their interactions with narrative worlds. In particular, the chapter draws on theories and empirical research from cognitive psychology to characterize readers' thoughts and emotional responses as they engage with a text. It begins by discussing the basic cognitive processes that make contact with readers' memory representations as their narrative experiences unfold. It describes how these basic processes influence the inferences readers' encode as well as their judgements about narrative events. It then turns to the claim that readers function as participants in narrative worlds and, as such, encode the same types of mental contents they would encode were they actual participants in the narrative events. It discusses how memory processes shape readers' participation in narratives and suggests that these processes affect fundamental responses such as readers' judgements of the normality of characters' behaviours and their similarity to those characters. Readers' judgements of similarity, in turn, can affect the empathy they feel towards particular characters. Finally, it considers readers' individual reports of their transportation to narrative worlds. The concept of transportation captures, for example, the extent to which readers report themselves to have been emotionally and cognitively involved in a particular narrative experience. It explores how readers' life experiences affect their transportation into particular narratives.