Mental Models of the Media.

When people watch television or movies, a basic goal that all viewers of the media have is to have a coherent understanding of what they are watching. To accomplish this, viewers construct mental representations of the movie as the movie unfolds. This representation includes information about the characters and situations within the movie, and prior expectations based on knowledge about the genre of movies or the actors and actresses starring in the movie. This combination of information provides the basis for understanding the movie as it unfolds and for predicting future events in the movie. Unfortunately, little research has focused on how people create a coherent understanding of what they are watching (but see Livingstone, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1996). This focus on the understanding ? or coherence ? of a movie, and on the cognitive representation that under girds it is central to the mental models approach. Extensive research has been conducted focusing on mental models of text comprehension (Bower & Rinck, 1999; Garnham, 1996; Garnham & Oakhill, 1996; Gernsbacher, 1995; Graesser & Zwaan, 1995; Graesser & Wiemer-Hastings, 1999; Magliano, Zwaan, & Graesser, 1999; Oakhill, 1996; Rickheit & Habel, 1999; van Dijk, 1999; Zwaan, 1999). This research has demonstrated that mental models play an integral role in the comprehension and representation of written texts. In addition, mental models guide the nature of the inferences that people make while reading a text. In our opinion, understanding books, personal discourse, the media, or the world in general, requires constructing a coherent mental model to represent the event. To the extent that a person can construct such a model, the person is said to understand the event (Halford, 1993; Wyer & Radvansky, 1999). Unfortunately, we are aware of no research has that explored the role of mental models in the comprehension of media stories...ASA-The mental models? approach reflects the observation that thinking typically occurs within and about situations (Garnham, 1997). Mental models are the cognitive representations of (a) situations in real, hypothetical, or imaginary worlds, including space and time, (b) entities found in the situation and the states those entities are in, (c) interrelationships between the various entities and the situation, including causality and intentionality, and (d) events that occur in that situation (Garnham, 1997; Johnson-Laird, 1983; Radvansky & Zacks, 1997; Wyer & Radvansky, 1999; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). We have used the mental models approach to investigate how a movie is understood. When watching a movie, generating a coherent understanding of that movie can be difficult because of limitations in both attentional resources and short-term memory. Indeed, sometimes movies are designed to take advantage of these limitations to create ambiguity. Consider the movie Falling Down. In the movie, Michael Douglas plays a defense engineer (Defens) who has been fired from his job. The movie begins with him stuck in a traffic jam near downtown L.A. He abandons his car and proceeds to start walking home. Everyone he encounters, mostly stereotypic characters such as a threatening ghetto gang, a rude convenience store owner, and a white supremacist, all upset him. He reacts with increasing violence. As he walks across L.A., he calls his ex-wife, telling her that he is coming home to see his daughter for her birthday. She is clearly frightened by the phone call, indicating that there is more to the situation. By the end of the movie, viewers are convinced that Defens is insane. There are three interpretations of the movie, based on the movie cover and comments about the movie on the web. One interpretation portrays Defens as an average man who is fighting back against an insane society (hero interpretation). A second interpretation is that the movie is a comedy about a man dealing with exaggerated everyday pressures (comedy interpretation). The third interpretation is that the movie is about a man on the edge of insanity who finally goes over the edge because of the pressures from society (insane interpretation). Given the distinct interpretations of this movie, we decided to test whether the different interpretations resulted in different mental models of the movie. We used a multidimensional scaling (MDS) of viewers? perceptions of the characters in the movie to identify the different mental models of the movie. We hypothesize that the different interpretations should manifest themselves in different configurations within a multidimensional space. In our investigation of people?s mental models of this movie, we had 89 participants watch the movie. At the end of the movie, we had them rate the similarities of the 9 main characters in the movie. That is, for every pair of characters, participants rated their similarity on a11-point scale (for a total of 36 similarity ratings). We converted the similarity ratings to dissimilarity ratings and then submitted the dissimilarity ratings to a multidimensional scaling analysis. The solution is a depiction in a multidimensional space of participants? perceptions of the characters. We viewed this solution as a snapshot of the participants? mental model of the movie. After the similarity ratings, participants rated on an 11-point scale their acceptance of each of the interpretations. Almost everyone thought that Defens was insane. However, about half the participants thought that he also was a hero, whereas the other half did not. We looked at the multidimensional scaling solution separately for those who thought of Defense as a hero and those who did not. The MDS analysis indicated that a 3-dimensional representation was the best fit for both the here and the insane interpretations of the movie (insane interpretation: stress = .066, % variance = .96; here interpretation: stress = .070, % variance = .95; Kruskal & Wish, 1978). In order to interpret the multidimensional space, we had the same 89 participants rate each of the characters along a number of different dimensions. The locations of the people within the MDS were used as predictor variables and the ratings along the different variables were the criterion variable in a series of regression analysis that were used to test the fit of various dimensional interpretations (see Kruskal & Wish, 1978; Roskos-Ewoldsen, 1997). For both interpretations of the movie, the first dimension was an evaluative good/bad dimension (insane interpretation, R2 = .97; hero interpretation, good/bad R2 = .98). Defens was perceived as moderately bad in each interpretation of the movie. Likewise, the second dimension dealt with the obsessiveness of the characters (insane interpretation, R2 = .95; hero interpretation, R2 = .94). Again, Defens was interpreted as moderately obsessive in each interpretation of the movie. However, the third dimension for the insane interpretation dealt the aggressiveness of the characters (R2 = .89). Defens was judged as moderately aggressive. On the other hand, the third dimension for the hero interpretation dealt how sympathetic the characters were in the movie (R2 = .93). Defens was judged as sympathetic in this interpretation of the movie. We interpret these findings as suggestion that people did construct different mental models for the different interpretations of the movie. Furthermore, we believe that this findings suggest that MDS provides a useful methodology for capturing snapshots of people?s mental models of a movie or television show. References Bower, G. H., & Rinck, M. (1999). Goals as generators of activation in narrative comprehension. In. S. R. Goldman, A. C. Graesser, & P. van den Broek (Eds.), Narrative comprehension, causality and coherence: Essays in honor of Tom Trabasso (pp. 111-134). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Garnham, A. (1996). The other side of mental models: Theories of language comprehension. In J. Oakhill & A. Garnham (Eds.), Mental models in cognitive science: Essays in honour of Phil Johnson-Laird (pp. 35-52). East Susses, U.K.: Psychology Press. Garnham, A. (1997). Representing information in mental models. In M. A. Conway (Ed.), Cognitive models of memory (pp. 149-172). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gernsbacher, M. A. (1995). Activating knowledge of fictional characters? emotional states. In C. A. Weaver III, S. Mannes, & C. R. Fletcher (Eds.), Discourse comprehension: Essays in honor of Walter Kintsch (pp. 141-156). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Graesser, A. C. & Wiemer-Hastings, K. (1999). Situation models and concepts in story comprehension. In. S. R. Goldman, A. C. Graesser, & P. van den Broek (Eds.), Narrative comprehension, causality and coherence: Essays in honor of Tom Trabasso (pp. 77-92). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Graesser, A. C., & Zwaan, R. A. (1995). Inference generation and the construction of situation models. In C. A. Weaver III, S. Mannes, & C. R. Fletcher (Eds.), Discourse comprehension: Essays in honor of Walter Kintsch (pp. 117-140). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Halford, G. S. (1993). Children?s understanding: The development of mental models. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kruskal, J. P., & Wish, M. (1978). Multidimensional scaling. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Livingstone, S. M. (1987). The implicit representation of characters in Dallas: a multidimensional scaling approach. Human Communication Research, 13, 399-420. Livingstone, S. M. (1989). Interpretive viewers and structured programs. Communication Research, 16, 25-57. Livingstone, S. M. (1990). Interpreting a television narrative: How different viewers see a story. Journal of communication, 40, 72-84. Livingstone, S. M. (1996). Making sense of television (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Magliano, J. P., Zwaan, R. A., & Graesser, A. (1999). The role of situational continuity in narrative understanding. In H. van Oostendorp & S. R. Goldman (eds.), The construction of mental representations during reading (pp 219-246). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Oakhill, J. (1996). Mental models of children?s text comprehension. In J. Oakhill & A. Garnham (Eds.), Mental models in cognitive science: Essays in honour of Phil Johnson-Laird (pp. 77-94). East Susses, U.K.: Psychology Press. Radvansky, G. A., & Zacks, R. T. (1997). The retrieval of situation-specific information. In M. A. Conway (Ed.), Cognitive models of memory (pp. 173-213). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rickheit, G. & Habel, C. (eds.) (1999). Mental models in discourse processing and reasoning. Amsterdam: North Holland. Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R. (1997). Implicit theories of persuasion. Human Communication Research, 24, 31-63. van Dijk, T. A. (1999). Context models in discourse processing. In H. van Oostendorp & S. R. Goldman (eds.), The construction of mental representations during reading (pp 123-147). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Wyer, R. S., Jr., & Radvansky, G. A. (1999). The comprehension and validation of information. Psychological Review, 106, 89-118. Zwaan, R. A., & Radvansky, G. A. (1998). Situation models in language comprehension and memory. Psychological Bulletin, 123, 162-185. Zwaan, R. A. (1999). Five dimensions of narrative comprehension: The event-indexing model. In. S. R. Goldman, A. C. Graesser, & P. van den Broek (Eds.), Narrative comprehension, causality and coherence: Essays in honor of Tom Trabasso (pp. 93-110). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]