History is, of course, essential for understanding any subject. Robinson Crusoe , first published in , is an excellent novel for introducing the study of British imperialism which is a prerequisite for understanding our contemporary global cultural economy.
In our globalising world, the stakes could not be higher. Many of our students will end up making policy, allocating aid, driving the global economy. They will change the world. Literature and humanistic thinking enable them to change it for the better. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom.
Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. But maybe you're curious about something like the Black Lives Matter movement and you'd like to understand what it's like to be a minority in a predominantly white-based society.
Reading a book that puts you in that space could be a way for you to understand the issues on a different level. Look Who's Morphing is a groundbreaking collection of short stories that expanded what I thought was possible in Australian fiction. It plays with identity, transformation and pop culture in wild, hilarious and boundlessly inventive ways. The book has been a significant influence on my own work and is undoubtedly an Australian classic. I read this when I was I hate to offer cliches, but I mean this in the truest sense: it changed my life.
Gould's rocked my world. I couldn't believe how someone could write about the real world and real history, and yet do it with such creativity and imagination. It completely changed how I thought about the history of where I'm from, especially my understanding of Indigenous people and transportation.
It made new worlds seem possible within my own. This book changed the way I thought about writing and language. Roy's writing style breaks all the rules and it spoke straight to my senses and thoughts without having to go via the framework of 'writing'. It reaffirmed my impulse to use visceral and observational imagery based on what I was seeing, smelling, feeling, hearing rather than delivering it through the constructs of learned words.
I would read and re-read passages over and over again as they blew my little mind. There was no time limit and participants had to click a button at the end of the page to continue with the experiment. Total reading time of the story was measured from story screen onset to button click.
After participants read the story, they responded to the items of the immersion questionnaire followed by the appreciation rating. Selecting a value on the scale prompted the next screen. Participants saw pictures and decided whether the scene displayed on the image happened in the story they just read or not. Each participant saw all 16 pictures, of which four were displaying two different situations from the story they just read.
Every event was displayed once from the protagonist's perspective and once from the perspective of an eyewitness. The pictures from the stories that the participant had not read functioned as filler items. Participants were instructed to react as fast as possible.
Reaction time was measured from the time of picture onset to button press. Finally, participants responded to the six questions regarding their regular engagement with fiction and non-fiction. After these participants were debriefed and received some information about the writer and the research. Participants were given the option to sign up for receiving the results of the study.
In total, the experiment took about 10—15 min. Participant responses were collected by the web application as time series data, which were sent to the server when a connection was available.
If the connection to the server failed during this communication process, then the web application stored the data and retried later in the experiment. This combination allowed users to do the experiment on desktop computers or mobile devices and in environments with periodic internet access such as when commuting. The application flow was restricted to linear navigation with each screen being visible once in its sequence. Neither refreshing the browser nor using the browser back button would alter this linear application flow.
The participant could exit the experiment at any stage; with the data from their participation having already been stored on the server provided internet access was available. The data were averaged for each scale of the immersion questionnaire. For each other measure e. The data of the online sample and the reference group, which was tested in the lab were analyzed separately. Each of the measures was analyzed in a separate model with fictionality fact or fiction and perspective 1st or 3rd person as predictors which were allowed to interact, and story as random effect with random intercept Baayen et al.
In addition, individual differences in preference for perspective taking, gender, age, education level, whether Dutch was native language or not, and the two mean scores for general exposure to fictional and factual stories were included as factors in the model. For the 2 models testing reaction time in the picture recognition task we also included whether the response was correct or not.
Age, education level, and whether they were native speakers of Dutch were not included in the model for the reference group because of the homogeneity of the sample.
P-values for specific effects were obtained by a model comparison procedure using the asymptotic chi square distribution. Statistical details about all models and results can be found in the supplementary materials Datasheets S4, S5. Because of the number of measures, we first report a summary of findings, followed by statistical details per measure. We want to point out that due to our large sample size, effects with very small effect sizes can become statistically significant.
For ease of reading, the results of the reference group are only reported for the picture task as they did not differ drastically from the online group. Details about the statistical models and the results of both groups can be found in the supplementary material Datasheet S4. Whether the stories were presented as fictional or factual had no influence on how long participants spent on reading the stories, or on any of the immersion subscales.
In sum, whether stories were presented as fictional or as factual did not influence reading experience as we measured it. For perspective 1st or 3rd person , the second factor of interest, several statistically significant effects were observed.
There was no effect of perspective on reading time, nor on the immersion subscales attention, transportation, and mental imagery. Otherwise, none of the appreciation measures were affected by the perspective of the story and there were no interaction effects. High scores for both 1st person perspective preference and 3rd person perspective preference were associated with higher scores on all scales of the immersion questionnaire 0.
In addition, 1st and 3rd person preference were associated with lower scores on the rating whether the stories were perceived as sad. In the picture task, we observe no effect for fictionality or perspective. There were no differences in the reaction times to pictures associated with condition, perspective, or perspective taking preference. For the distribution of effects between stories, see Datasheet 6, the full data set is available for further analyses and replication on Datasheet 7.
Figure 2. Differences in perspective taking; A 1st person perspective taking, B 3rd person perspective taking. There was no difference in perspective taking depending on whether the stories were presented as factual or fictional.
Stories in 1st person perspective were rated significantly higher for 1st person perspective taking than stories in 3rd person perspective. Figure 3. Time in seconds participants took to read the story. There was no difference between reading times in the fictional or factual condition, as well as no difference in reading time dependent on perspective.
Figure 4. There was no difference in immersion depending on whether the stories were presented as factual or fictional. Stories in 1st person perspective had significantly higher scores for attention and emotional engagement with the protagonist compared to stories in 3rd person perspective, but not for transportation and mental imagery during reading.
Figure 5. There were no significant effects of fictionality or perspective. In the present study, we tested the influence of perspective referring to protagonists of short stories labeled as fictional or as based on true events. We measured immersion and appreciation as well as memory for events depicted in the stories with an online study reaching a broad sample of readers from all ages. In line with previous research we found that 1st person stories facilitate 1st person perspective taking.
In addition, we found that 1st person stories can lead to higher emotional engagement with the protagonist compared to 3rd person stories. However, we did not replicate earlier findings Hartung et al.
Moreover, we found that people who like reading fiction generally read faster and are more likely to engage in 1st person perspective taking. Despite not finding effects for the perspective in which the story is narrated, we find evidence that perspective taking influences immersion and appreciation of stories.
Readers who engage in perspective taking, regardless of whether they select 1st or 3rd person perspective, report higher immersion during reading and like the stories better. Instead, we found evidence that people who engage in 1st person perspective taking during reading respond more accurately to pictures from 1st and 3rd person perspective, whereas readers who engage in 3rd person perspective taking only have an advantage in responding to pictures from 3rd person perspective.
This suggests that engaging in a story from a 1st person perspective allows readers to construct a more flexible mental representation of the events in the story compared to readers who immerse from a spectator's perspective.
We find no reaction time advantages in the picture recognition task associated with perspective taking. This could be attributed to the less controlled settings in our online study as compared to typical behavioral experiments in the lab.
Yet, we also do not observe any trend for an effect in the reference group. The finding that perspective can influence some aspects of reading is in line with previous research Hartung et al. However, in contrast to the findings reported by Hartung et al. Engaging in perspective taking during reading in turn seems to increase immersion and appreciation across all measures, so the pronoun effect reported by earlier research is likely to be an indirect effect of perspective taking and might also vary for different stories.
Future research is needed to scrutinize this finding in more detail. There were some notable individual differences dependent on whether people have a general preference for engaging with fictional or factual stories.
We found that avid readers of fiction are also faster readers which is in line with the notion that reading goals associated with fiction are linked to reduced scrutiny and attention to detail Green et al. Moreover, avid readers are more likely to engage in 1st person perspective taking which could be related to the hypothesis that fiction reading is linked to empathy and perspective taking e.
In addition, we find age-related differences in multipole measures indicating that older readers generally score lower on most of our measures. As the effect sizes are negligibly small, we refrain from interpreting them because it is likely that these effects are linked to the type of material we chose or older readers being more critical rather than being an effect of psychological interest. We found throughout all our measures no evidence that knowing that a story is based on true or fictional events affects reading behavior, experiential aspects of reading, or memory for events in the stories.
The results show that the belief a reader has about whether a story is based on a true event or not has no effect on the experiential aspects of reading such as immersion and appreciation of stories.
This is in line with accounts that argue that an engaging narrative style is more important than readers' expectations about the fictionality of the information van Krieken et al. The fact that we do not observe any difference between stories labeled as based on true or fictional events seems to be in contrast with previous experimental research on the effects of factuality on reading behavior which showed that factual and fictional stories are read differently Zwaan, ; Altmann et al.
Yet, we think that our findings are complementary rather than in contrast with previous findings. This manipulation does not only address factuality of the information, but likely is confounded with different genre and reading situation dependent contexts and reading goals.
He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College. Their findings appear online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition. Experience-taking doesn't happen all the time. It only occurs when people are able, in a sense, to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading, Kaufman said.
In one experiment, for example, the researchers found that most college students were unable to undergo experience-taking if they were reading in a cubicle with a mirror. In the voting study, 82 undergraduates who were registered and eligible to vote were assigned to read one of four versions of a short story about a student enduring several obstacles on the morning of Election Day such as car problems, rain, long lines before ultimately entering the booth to cast a vote.
This experiment took place several days before the November presidential election. Some versions were written in first person "I entered the voting booth while some were written in third person "Paul entered the voting booth". In addition, some versions featured a student who attended the same university as the participants, while in other versions, the protagonist in the story attended a different university.
After reading the story, the participants completed a questionnaire that measured their level of experience-taking -- how much they adopted the perspective of the character in the story. For example, they were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements like "I found myself feeling what the character in the story was feeling" and "I felt I could get inside the character's head.
The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking.
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