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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 20, 2026

Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading

Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading

Published on: October 18, 2018

Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension.

Christelle Gillioz¹, Pascal Gygax, Isabelle Tapiero

¹Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology = Revue Canadienne De Psychologie Experimentale

|July 11, 2012

Summary

Readers infer protagonist emotions better from behavioral descriptions than emotion labels. High visuospatial working memory enhances this effect during simulation, suggesting perceptual mental models.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Psycholinguistics
Narrative Comprehension

Background:

Understanding how readers infer a protagonist's emotional state is crucial for narrative comprehension.
Individual differences in cognitive abilities like working memory and empathy may influence emotional inference.
Previous research suggests mental models of narratives might incorporate perceptual and behavioral information.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how readers represent a protagonist's emotional status in short narratives.
To examine the role of general working memory, visuospatial working memory, empathy, and simulation in emotional inference.
To compare the impact of emotional labels versus behavioral descriptions on reading times and mental representations.

Main Methods:

Participants read short narratives with manipulated target sentences (emotional label vs. behavioral description; congruent vs. incongruent).
Reading times for target sentences were recorded as a measure of processing difficulty.
Individual differences in working memory, empathy, and simulation abilities were assessed.

Main Results:

The difference in reading times between congruent and incongruent sentences was larger for behavioral descriptions than for emotional labels.
This effect was more pronounced in participants with high visuospatial working memory when they were instructed to simulate the narrative.
Reading times indicated that behavioral information is more readily integrated into mental models than abstract emotional labels.

Conclusions:

Mental models of narratives may be primarily perceptual and include behavioral elements more readily than explicit emotion labels.
Visuospatial working memory and simulation play a significant role in constructing detailed, behavior-based mental representations of characters' emotions.
Findings support theories emphasizing the embodied and perceptual nature of mental simulations during narrative processing.