You Won’t Believe What I Found: How Different Types of Mysteries Affect Readers’ Narrative Processing

• Main Author: Shawver, Zared Robert
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2021
• Subjects: Cognitive psychology; Psychobiology; Psychology
• ISBN: 9798780633914

Any moment in life offers infinite mysteries that can catch people’s attention, hold it captive, and invite them to wonder about possible solutions. Unfortunately, research on how people experience mysteries is limited. I sought to extend this small literature by exploring three types of mysteries that people encounter. I developed a set of mysteries that demonstrably piqued people’s curiosity. I wrote brief stories to explore how people experienced each mystery in a narrative context. In these stories, I either provided a solution to the mystery or left it to linger unsolved. I conducted six experiments to understand how readers process mysteries. In Experiments 1-4, I used a procedure in which people recognize probe words that encapsulate the content of the mysteries. The speed with which people recognize the probe words indicates whether people kept the content of mysteries active in their working memory. I predicted that people would recognize probe words for unsolved mysteries faster than those for solved mysteries. In each experiment, I probed people at early and late locations in the stories. I predicted that unsolved mysteries would remain active later in the stories. Unfortunately, I did not find clear evidence that unsolved mysteries remain more active than solved mysteries. I did observe that people reliably recognized some types of mysteries more easily than others. In Experiment 5, I reorganized the stories in a way that I expected would enhance the potency of the mysteries and probed people at a single location. Again, I did not find clear evidence for my major prediction. In Experiment 6, I used different probe words. I chose one word that came before the mystery and a second that came after the mystery. I expected that mysteries would capture readers’ attention, which would have consequences for how they processed information that came after the mystery. I predicted that people would recognize the probe word that came before the mystery faster than one that came after the mystery. Unfortunately, my hypotheses were once again not supported. In conclusion, it seems that only a subset of potential mysteries affect the way that people process narratives.