WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, Nov. 15, 2010) - Harry … Hogwarts ... Just mentioning these names transports millions of us vividly into the mind and world of Harry Potter, especially with a new movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, due for release on Friday.
Good teachers have always known that stories engage students in a way that facts and figures rarely do.
Now a new study from the University of Waterloo, published in the journal Cognition, is shedding light on how children step into the minds and shoes of story characters, and how early they can do so.
“For the first time, we have shown that when listening to a story, four- and five-year olds mentally simulate aspects of the story character's experiences, such as how slowly or quickly they may be moving," said lead author Agnieszka Fecica, a psychology visiting scholar, who conducted the research as part of her doctoral work with Daniela O’Neill, a professor of psychology.
Using a novel method that involved children listening to a story on a computer, one sentence at a time, the researchers were able to discover that children’s time to process the sentences differed depending on how the character was moving.
"When we told children that the character was walking past a park and seeing things like children playing baseball and squirrels running, children took longer to process these story events than if we told them the character was being driven past the park," Fecica said.
O’Neill said the results indicate that during story comprehension, children, much like adults, construct mental representations of stories known as situation models. These situation models include details of varied aspects of stories.
"Our results suggest that they also include, in a very dynamic way, aspects of how a character would experience the events in a bodily fashion - that is, if they were walking they would move more slowly than if they were being driven," O’Neill said.
Similarly, in a second study, the researchers found that children’s time to process the sentences about a character getting ready to go somewhere was slower when children were told that the character thought going there was "horrible" rather than "great."
O’Neill said that children’s processing times seemed to suggest that they were mentally simulating how eagerly a character got ready, and importantly that this happened even if the child themselves didn’t share this view.
“So even very young children appear to be taking into account the impact of both physical actions and psychological states on the speed of a character’s actions," O’Neill added.
And this was done in oral stories alone - children simply heard the stories, with no accompanying pictures.
Scholars have long stressed the fundamental nature of our ability to create and comprehend stories. Fecica and O’Neill’s findings shed light on what a growing number of other cognitive scientists believe is a fundamental part of how we, as humans, come to comprehend narratives, by embodying and simulating the narrative events described.
The research was funded by a Natural Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) discovery research grant awarded to O'Neill and an NSERC Canada graduate scholarship awarded to Fecica.
About Waterloo
The University of Waterloo, located at the heart of Canada's Technology Triangle, is one of Canada's leading comprehensive universities. Waterloo is home to 30,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students who are dedicated to making the future better and brighter. Waterloo, known for the largest post- secondary co-operative education program in the world, supports enterprising partnerships in learning, research and discovery. For more information about Waterloo, visit www.uwaterloo.ca.
