Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments investigated the effects of the number of interesting events in a story on memory for that story. The results differed depending on whether or not the story followed a stereotypical script. For script-based stories, adding interesting events spaced throughout the stories decreased the stories' memorability. However, for non-script-based stories, adding a few interesting events aided memory for the stories, but adding too many decreased memory. These results were interpreted in terms of a limited resource model of story understanding limited resource model of story understanding that focusses processing on interesting events.