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Updated: Jul 20, 2026
06:35
Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
Comprehending narratives containing flashbacks: evidence for temporally organized representations.
Berry Claus1, Stephanie Kelter
1Institute of Psychology, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany. clausb@rz.uni-potsdam.de
Summary
Readers mentally organize event sequences, even when narratives present events out of order. The perceived time elapsed between events impacts how easily earlier events are recalled, influencing narrative representation.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Narrative Comprehension
Background:
- Understanding how readers mentally represent event sequences is crucial for narrative comprehension.
- Reader-constructed representations may differ from explicit text structures.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the temporal representations readers construct for narratives.
- To determine if readers form temporal structures independent of textual order.
Main Methods:
- Participants read narratives with events presented chronologically or non-chronologically (flashback).
- Information about event duration was manipulated.
- Mental accessibility of an earlier event (E1) was tested.
Main Results:
- Event 1 (E1) was less accessible when implied to have occurred longer ago.
- This effect persisted regardless of whether events were presented chronologically or non-chronologically.
- Textual order did not solely dictate temporal representation.
Conclusions:
- Readers actively construct temporally organized mental representations of narratives.
- Temporal distance influences the accessibility of events in narrative memory.
- Reader-driven temporal organization occurs even when text structure is non-chronological.
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