Participatory responses in text understanding

In the course of understanding a narrative, readers generate participatory responses (or p-responses) that arise as a consequence of involvement in the text. For example, a reader might express a mental preference that one of a pair of combatants win a battle. In three experiments we showed that readers' p-responses, in the form of preferences about how stories will turn out, can interfere with verification of previously known information about the actual outcomes of those stories. Experiment 1 demonstrated that when readers were made to prefer a negative outcome, verification was impaired following a brief delay. In Experiment 2, impaired verification was also found when subjects confirmed the outcomes immediately after each story. In Experiment 3, preferences for negative outcomes failed to produce longer verification latencies for information that was not related to the stories' outcomes.