“Frog, don’t do that!”: The coordination of comprehension, participation, and evaluation in narrative experiences

Narrative experiences involve a range of ways in which people engage with a narrative. We comprehend, have a sense of participation in narrative experiences, and evaluate them. Theories have been proposed and tested for these different aspects of narrative experience, but more research is needed to understand how these aspects are coordinated. There is some research suggesting that the aspects of narrative experience require attentional focus. We hypothesized that participation and evaluation are less likely when there is more attentional demand in-moment-to-moment processing needed to support comprehension. Specifically, visual media such as pictures and movies have attentional scaffolds that help viewers know where to look as they process the narrative whereas texts do not have these affordances for attention. As such, we explored the extent to which media affected the propensity to engage in comprehension, participatory, and evaluative activities when participants thought aloud about picture and text-based versions of stories.