Taking different perspectives on a story.

Abstract

College undergraduates read stories from one of two directed perspectives or no directed perspective.An idea's significance in terms of a given perspective determined whether the idea would be learned and, independently, whether it could be recalled a week later.These results were interpreted to mean that alternative high-level schemata can provide frameworks for assimilating a text, perhaps by providing "slots" for different types of information.Later the schema from which an instantiated memorial representation of a passage was constructed may furnish the retrieval plan for recovery of detailed information.