Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.