THE ROLE OF READER AGE AND FOCUS OF ATTENTION IN CREATING SITUATION MODELS FROM NARRATIVES

We examined adult age differences in the mental representation of situ ations and how readers update this representation during narrative com prehension. Older and younger adults memorized a building layout and t hen read narratives about a protagonist's actions in this building. Th e narratives contained critical sentences that described the protagoni st moving from one room (the ''source room'') into another(the ''goal room''), through an unmentioned path room. Each critical sentence was followed by a target sentence referring to an object in one of these r ooms. Half of the target sentences explicitly mentioned the room conta ining this object and half did not. Reading time increased when the ta rget object was more distant from the protagonist and when the room co ntaining the object was not mentioned, suggesting that readers tracked the protagonist's location in the layout and allocated resources in o rder to maintain coherence in the situation model. Older adults' readi ng times differentially slowed with distance, and older readers who mo re accurately understood the narrative differentially slowed when the location of the target object was not mentioned. Finally, the more acc urate readers (older and younger) slowed primarily when updating was m ost difficult (i. e., both when the room containing the object was not mentioned and for more distant objects). While these findings reveal qualitative similarity in how older and younger readers update spatial ly organized situation models, they also suggest that older readers mu st sometimes allocate more resources to this updating process in order to maintain comprehension.