Mental Models of Text and Film: a multidimensional scaling analysis
Jack A. Rowell, Peter D. Moss · Educational Psychology · 1986
Following a brief review of research using multidimensional scaling as a measure of literary perception, it is proposed that the technique provides one possible route to an illumination of Bransford & Johnson's (1973) idea that when people understand a text they create a model within which events described in the text might reasonably occur. Two hypotheses are proposed and tested. First, that models are constructed, in memory, of the inter‐relationships and cross‐relationships of character attributions made in accordance with those themes understood in reading a piece of work of novel length. Secondly, that similar models are constructed from viewing a feature length film. Orwell's (1945) Animal Farm, the book and the film (Halas & Bachelor, 1955), were selected as content because of their known distinctive structures. Results support both hypotheses. They also support the earlier work of Bisanz (Bisanz, La Porte, Vesonder & Voss, 1978) concerning the validity of multidimensional scaling for representing mental organisations of the thematic structure of short stories, extending their results to the reading and viewing, respectively, of a novel length book and film. Two related issues concerning the possible effects of medium of communication on modelling and the educational implications of modelling are discussed.