Can readers fully adopt the perspective of the protagonist?

Abstract

Despite the centrality of the protagonist during narrative comprehension, evidence indicates that readers do not typically approach the text from the protagonist’s point of view. Experiments 1a–1c demonstrated that both explicit task instructions and the first-person point of view resulted in comprehension being influenced by perspective-relevant information; this indicated that readers were adopting the perspective of the protagonist. However, Experiments 2a–3b showed that even when readers adopt the protagonist’s perspective, they cannot do so to the exclusion of related perspective-irrelevant information. Results are discussed in the context of the RI-Val model of comprehension in which perspective-relevant information and perspective-irrelevant information are both available and compete for influence during comprehension.