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Decision Making01:20

Decision Making

Decision-making is a fundamental cognitive process that involves evaluating alternatives and selecting among them. This process can range from simple choices, such as deciding what to wear, to complex decisions, like choosing a major in college or a career path. The complexity of the decision often dictates the approach we use, which can be broadly categorized into two types: automatic and controlled decision-making.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 8, 2026

Training Synesthetic Letter-color Associations by Reading in Color
10:27

Training Synesthetic Letter-color Associations by Reading in Color

Published on: February 20, 2014

How readers experience characters' decisions.

Matthew E Jacovina1, Richard J Gerrig

  • 1Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2500, USA. mjacovin@ic.sunysb.edu

Memory & Cognition
|September 21, 2010
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Readers form preferences for characters' decisions, influencing how they process story outcomes. Mismatches between preferred decisions and outcomes slow down reading, showing readers actively engage with narratives.

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A Naturalistic Setup for Presenting Real People and Live Actions in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Studies

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Narrative Psychology
  • Reading Comprehension

Background:

  • Readers form mental preferences for characters' decisions during narrative engagement.
  • Understanding how these preferences shape the experience of story outcomes is crucial for narrative comprehension research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how readers' preferences for characters' decisions influence their processing of story outcomes.
  • To examine the temporal dynamics of integrating narrative events based on reader preferences.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1: Participants rated preferred character decisions in brief stories, then read outcomes where decisions and outcomes either matched or mismatched.
  • Experiment 2: Replicated findings using a more naturalistic reading task to assess reading time course.
  • Utilized reading time as a measure of cognitive processing and assimilation of narrative information.

Main Results:

  • Readers took significantly longer to process outcome sentences when there was a mismatch between their preferred decisions and the actual story outcomes.
  • This reading time effect was replicated in a naturalistic reading setting, confirming its robustness.
  • Findings indicate that readers' preferences actively modulate their engagement with and understanding of narrative causality.

Conclusions:

  • Readers encode and utilize preferences for character decisions to structure their interpretation of story outcomes.
  • The temporal processing of narrative information is sensitive to the alignment between reader expectations and story events.
  • This research highlights the active role readers play in constructing meaning from narratives.