It is well established that readers form mental images when reading a narrative. The influence of mental imagery on theway people experience stories is however still unclear. In two experiments reported here, participants received instructionsaimed at encouraging or discouraging mental imagery before reading literary short stories. After reading, participantsanswered questions about their reading experiences. The results from the first experiment suggested an important roleof mental imagery in determining reading experiences. However, the results from the second experiment showed thatindividual trait differences in how imaginative participants are predicted reading experiences much better than guidedmental imagery. Moreover, the role of mental imagery did not extend to aspects of the reading experience other thanmental imagery. The implications of these results for the relationship between mental imagery and reading experiencesare discussed.

Situation models are known to help structure our experiences in our memory. But what are the ingredients of a situation model and to what degree do abstract event features contribute to updating of situation models? We manipulated abstract event feature dimensions and narrative specific factors in an experiment in which participants actively constructed a narrative from a random order of event descriptions. We investigated the influence of abstract factors (“degree of feature-change”, “event position”) on response speeding during a subsequent oddball task. Participants were faster for oddballs with a different degree of feature change, which interacted with whether the oddball was from within the same story or from another story. When looking at other-story-oddballs only, we found an interaction between position within the event structure and degree of feature change. Our results suggest that people use abstractions of event features which are important for the instantiation of a situation model.

We tested whether conceptual processing is modality-specific by tracking the time course of the Conceptual Modality Switch effect. Forty-six participants verified the relation between property words and concept words. The conceptual modality of consecutive trials was manipulated in order to produce an Auditory-to-visual switch condition, a Haptic-to- visual switch condition, and a Visual-to-visual, no-switch condition. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were time-locked to the onset of the first word (property) in the target trials so as to measure the effect online and to avoid a within-trial confound. A switch effect was found, characterized by more negative ERP amplitudes for modality switches than no- switches. It proved significant in four typical time windows from 160 to 750 milliseconds post word onset, with greater strength in posterior brain regions, and after 350 milliseconds. These results suggest that conceptual processing may be modality-specific in certain tasks, but also that the early stage of processing is relatively amodal.