VERIFICATION OF STATEMENTS ABOUT STORY WORLDS THAT DEVIATE FROM NORMAL CONCEPTIONS OF TIME - WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT EINSTEINS DREAMS

College students read chapters from a novel written by Alan Lightman ( Einstein's Dreams) and later provided verification judgments on the tr uth/falsity of test statements. Each chapter described a different fic tional village that incorporated assumptions about time that deviate f rom our normal TIME scheme, e.g., citizens knowing exactly when the wo rld will end, time flowing backward instead of forward. These novel as sumptions about time provided interesting insights about life and real ity. In two experiments, we examined whether readers could accurately incorporate these novel assumptions about time in the fictional story worlds, as manifested in the verification judgments for statements aft er story comprehension. The test statements included verbatim typical, verbatim atypical, inference typical, and inference atypical informat ion from the perspective of mundane reality that meshes with a normal TIME schema. Verification ratings were collected on a 6-point scale in Experiment 1, whereas Experiment 2 used a signal-response technique i n which binary true/false decisions were extracted at -.5, 1.5, 3.5, 5 .5, and 10.0 s. The college students were measured on literary experti se, reading skill, working memory span, and reading time. Readers with comparatively high literary expertise showed truth discrimination sco res that were compatible with a schema copy plus tag model, which assu mes that readers are good at detecting and remembering atypical verbat im information; this model predicts better (and faster) truth discrimi nation for verbatim atypical statements than for verbatim typical stat ements. In contrast, fast readers with comparatively low literary expe rtise were compatible with a filtering model; this model predicts that readers gloss over (or suppress) atypical verbatim information and sh ow advantages for verbatim typical information. All groups of readers had trouble inferentially propagating the novel assumptions about time in a fictional story world, but the slower readers were more accurate in their verification of the atypical inferences. A construction-inte gration model could explain the interactions among literary expertise, reading time, and the typicality of test statements. (C) 1998 Academi c Press.