Temporal-order iconicity bias in narrative event understanding and memory

ABSTRACT

Incongruence between the narrated (encoded) order and the actual chronological order of events is ubiquitous in various kinds of narratives and information modalities. The iconicity assumption in text comprehension proposes that readers will by default assume the chronological order to match the narrated order. However, it is not clear whether this iconicity assumption would directly bias inferred chronology of events and memory of their narrated order. In the current study, using non-linearly narrated video narratives as encoding materials, we dissociated the narrated order and the underlying chronological order of events. In Experiment 1, we found that participants’ judgments of the chronological order of events were biased by the narrated order, but not vice versa. In Experiment 2, when the chronological positions of events were provided during encoding, participants’ judgments of the chronological order were not biased by the narrated order, rather, their memory of the narrated order of events was biased by the chronological order. Interpreting the bias under a descriptive Bayesian framework, we offer a new perspective on the role of the iconicity assumption as prior belief, apart from prior knowledge about event sequences, in event understanding as well as memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Event cognition
• temporal order
• narratives
• iconicity
• Bayesian inference

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Boqiang Zhang for his suggestion for the experimental material in Experiment 1, Xing Tian for his laboratory support during data collection, and Fabrice Berna for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sze Chai Kwok http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7439-1193

Notes

1 In the film Memento, a series of coloured sequences are shown in reverse order. If the viewers have identified this temporal pattern of the narrated sequences, their prior belief should favour that the next coloured sequence to be narrated is chronologically earlier than the preceding coloured sequence.

2 In the film Arrival, a series of flashforward scenes depicting a mother’s pre-cognition of her daughter’s birth, childhood and death is easily misinterpreted as flashbacks (Bordwell, 2016). In this case, the viewers’ belief might also favour that the daughter-related scenes are chronologically earlier than the previous narrated events, that is, these scenes depict memory of the mother.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Education of PRC Humanities and Social Sciences Research grant 16YJC190006; STCSM Shanghai Pujiang Program 16PJ1402800; STCSM Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai 16ZR1410200; Fundamental Research Funds for tshe Central Universities 2018ECNU-HWFW007; JoRISS Incubating Project 2017/4; NYU Shanghai and the NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai (S.C.K.).