Narrative forms of mental representation and their influence on comprehension, communication and judgment, have rapidly become one of the main foci of research and theory in not only psychology but also other disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. No one has been more responsible for the awakening of interest in this area than Roger Schank and Bob Abel...
Narrative forms of mental representation and their influence on comprehension, communication and judgment, have rapidly become one of the main foci of research and theory in not only psychology but also other disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. No one has been more responsible for the awakening of interest in this area than Roger Schank and Bob Abelson. In their target article, they argue that narrative forms of mental representation, or "stories," are the basic ingredients of social knowledge that play a fundamental role in the comprehension of information conveyed in a social context, the storage of this information in memory, and the later communication of it to others. After explicating the cognitive processes that underlie the construction of narratives and their use in comprehension, memory and communication, the chapter authors consider the influence of stories on a number of more specific phenomena, including political judgment, marital relations and memory distortions that underlie errors in eyewitness testimony. The provocativeness of the target chapter is matched by that of the companion articles, each of which not only provides an important commentary on Schank and Abelson's conceptualization, but also makes an important contribution to knowledge in its own right. The diversity of perspectives reflected in these articles, whose authors include researchers in linguistics, memory and comprehension, social inference, cognitive development, social judgment, close relationships, and social ecology, testifies to the breadth of theoretical and empirical issues to which the target chapter is potentially relevant. This volume is a timely and important contribution to research and theory not only in social cognition but in many other areas as well.
How Do We Understand?
Picture it this way. An understander has a list of
beliefs, indexed by subject area. When a new story appears, he attempts to find a
belief of his that relates to it. When he does, he finds a story attached to that
belief and compares the story in memory to the one he is processing. His
understanding of the new story becomes, at that point, a function of the old
story. Once we find a belief and connected story, we need no further processing;
that is, the search for other beliefs is co-opted.
To the extent that
people do understand anything at all, we can identify three different features of
understanding:
1. Matching indices for story retrieval
2. Adding aspects of a new story to empty slots in an old one
3. Seeking further evidence for stories that were only tentat... (查看原文)
Stories, as we have noted, are the basis of our understanding. Understanding means
retrieving stories, and applying them to new experiences. The consequence of this
is profound for models of memory. If active memory is really a beehive of activity
involving story retrieval and story application, then what it means to remember
needs to be reinterpreted.
First, memories for events are indexed by our understanding of the events
themselves.
Second, and most important, we must consider how such indexes might have been
constructed in the first place.
Telling is remembering.
Everything else, what we fail to tell, gets forgotten, although it can often be
reconstructed. The effect of all this is very interesting. Not only do our
memories become a function of what we talk about, but if these sto... (查看原文)
还没人写过短评呢
还没人写过短评呢