Luke McClanahan

Author: Luke McClanahan | Major: Psychology | Semester: Fall 2022

My name is Luke McClanahan, and I am conducting a research project to complete my Fulbright Honors Thesis in Psychology, working alongside Dr. Bill Levine in the Psychological Science department.  My grant funding term is fall 2022, and I will defend my thesis following completion of the manuscript in spring 2023.

My honors thesis project, “Updating of Protagonist Information in Narratives,” is an attempt to further understand how readers read.  As we read narratives, information presented in the text can influence the way we read the rest of the story.  For example, if the exposition of a story describes a normal, non-fictional world but later describes a character doing something impossible, such as flying, we can expect a reader to show difficulty processing that information.  This can present in several ways: the reader might take longer to read the unusual sentence or read that sentence more times.  However, if the story had established a fictional world from the outset, a narrative event like a character flying might not cause any disruption to a reader, since the story’s context would be consistent throughout.

This specific project is focused on validation, the process by which readers compare information they encounter in a story with their prior knowledge.  This prior knowledge can consist of both real-world knowledge unrelated to the story and information gathered from earlier in the story.  Many contextual cues influence the way readers validate new information.  Sometimes readers do not validate new information whatsoever, that is, they effectively skip over it.  Readers sometimes fail to validate even inconsistent information, such as a character known to be indoors described as being outdoors. Much of the research on this topic focuses on the circumstances that make a reader more or less likely to notice inconsistencies.  Two noteworthy findings are that readers are more likely to skip over inconsistent information that is not directly relevant to the protagonist’s main goal and more likely to skip over inconsistent information when significant time has elapsed between mentions.

In this study, we investigated whether participants would validate inconsistent information related to the protagonist’s identity when it was not relevant to the story’s main goal.  Similar studies have investigated a similar question using other contextual information, most notably location.  Investigating another type of contextual information adds specificity to our knowledge about when validation occurs.  For our experiment, Dr. Levine and I wrote a series of passages wherein a protagonist is described as having a certain job, such as a carpenter.  Later in the story, the protagonist is described using another job title either identical, similar, or dissimilar to the initial description.  Importantly, the protagonist’s job in each story is entirely unrelated to their goal.  The stories described scenarios such as a carpenter going to the club for a drink.  Each participant read 24 passages, sentence by sentence.  Their reading time was recorded for each sentence.  Based on existing literature, we hypothesized that readers would not validate small changes in protagonist occupation, that is, we think that these changes are unimportant enough that readers will skip over them entirely.  Our data collection is finished, but our analysis is ongoing.

If readers can be coaxed into skipping over inconsistent information by manipulating narrative context, there may be instances where this could be exploited to present purposefully untrue information free of scrutiny.  Additionally, more robust knowledge of the circumstances that make readers more likely to carefully validate new information can be useful in educational settings where the goal is often to ensure ongoing validation and information retention.

Throughout this project, I have worked very closely with Dr. Bill Levine, who was my statistics for psychology professor during the Spring 2020 semester.  I connected with his teaching style, and I admired his prior work.  His Language Processing Lab has investigated many interesting characteristics of language and reading.  I reached out to him because of his publication titled “Timbre priming effects and expectation in melody.”  Though his research has not explored any musical ideas since then, I was intrigued by his interdisciplinary pursuits and accomplishments.

I began as a research assistant in The Language Processing Lab in the fall 2020 semester.  My primary responsibilities included proofreading and helping to develop research study materials.  At the end of that semester, Dr. Levine approached me with an offer to conduct an honors thesis project together. For the next three semesters, Dr. Levine and I met regularly (often weekly) to discuss literature relevant to his research foci and develop new questions.  We explored several research topics before settling on our project about validating inconsistencies and goal-relevance.  Our focus on protagonist identity and goal-relevance became the clear choice, since it builds upon research over which there is still significant debate.

Two years of weekly discussion about scientific literature was an invaluable experience.  Dr. Levine taught me to dissect research manuscripts, and I improved my ability to understand previously intimidating jargon.  This period of focused study prepared me to develop the materials for our study this past summer.  Writing them was a challenge, because we needed to maintain high control over the passages despite writing them from scratch.  We wrote 24 passages, all of which had to be standardized in terms of length, structure, word count, etc.  It is difficult to write stories that read naturally when there are so many constraints to satisfy.  Dr. Levine and I sent drafts back and forth, editing the stories until they were satisfactory.

We collected data during the Fall 2022 semester, and our analysis is nearly complete.  I have begun writing our manuscript, which is on track to be completed this upcoming spring.  I intend to defend the manuscript as my honors thesis in mid-spring.  I am tremendously thankful to Dr. Levine for guiding me through the research process.  He has taught me numerous transferrable skills, shared endless knowledge, and demonstrated an admirable example of curiosity and scientific integrity.