Research Bulletin: Are Some Types of Book Titles Better Liked and Better Remembered?

Humans spend vast amounts of time engaging with fictional stories. There are four main theories that help to explain this love for fiction. First, fiction contains social and psychological experiences of the characters, which helps us gain a better understanding of our own world (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Second, humans are drawn to gossip, which is essentially what fiction is. Fiction gives us a window into the social relationships of the characters. Third, humans are drawn to the moral content of fiction. People enjoy rooting for the good guys, but also enjoy stories about morally ambiguous characters (Janicke & Raney, 2015). Lastly, fiction is associated with hard-wired pleasures, such as an attraction to wealth, power, and beauty (Pinker, 1997).
 
Barnes and Black (2022) wanted to examine whether book titles containing words associated with these four theories would be more appealing and better remembered than titles without such words. The researchers generated five different words associated with each of the four theories. For example, the words “guilty, innocence, virtue, taboo, and evil” were used to create titles related to morality. Five titles that were not related to any of the four categories were selected from the USA Today Bestseller list, to act as the control titles. Undergraduates were then randomly assigned to view these titles, rate how appealing each
was, and then were tested on their memory for each title.
 
Participants rated the titles associated with the four main categories (i.e., mental states, gossip, morality, and pleasure) as more appealing than the control titles. For recall, the “mental states” category was the least well remembered out of all the categories. Next time you go to the bookstore, it would be fun to see whether the bestselling books have titles related to mental states, gossip, pleasure, or morality!
 
References
 
Barnes, J. L., & Black, J. E. (2022). What’s in a name? Book title salience and the
psychology of fiction. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16(2), 290–301.
 
Janicke, S. H., & Raney, A. A. (2015). Exploring the role of identification and moral
disengagement in the enjoyment of an antihero television series. Communications, 40(4),
485-495.
 
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of
social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192.
 
Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. Norton Company.
 
Post by Tia Kleiner
 
* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).
 
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

Harari: Sapiens

On Sunday, 9 February 2020, the New York Times reported that Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, had been on its nonfiction best-seller list for 91 weeks. At the centre of this book is an idea. It is that, sometime between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, we humans who had previously discovered how to make stone tools and fires, invented … stories.  

Harari tends to call these stories, myths: about how we came to be, about how we are influenced by gods and spirits. More recently, he says, we invented the myth of commercial companies with limited liability, so their owners cannot be sued. 

For a commercial company, Harari presents Peugeot, founded in 1896 by Armand Peugeot who turned the metal-working shop he had inherited from his parents into a limited company to make motor vehicles. Harari argues that it is by means of a myth that such a company can exist at all, and that huge numbers of people have been able to work for it. The company does not depend on Armand Peugeot. He died in 1915. Nor does it depend on any other individual. It’s an entity that is imagined. In 2008, Harari says, it produced 1.5 million automobiles, with revenues of 55 billion Euros. Two other prevalent myths, says Harari, are nation states such as USA, and religious groups such as the Catholic Church.

To explain the agricultural revolution, some 10,000 years ago, Harari writes about wheat. It used to be a kind of grass that grew in the Middle East. Then, within two millennia, it had convinced Homo Sapiens to cultivate it. “Wheat didn’t like rocks,” Harari writes on p.80, “so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields.” And he goes on: “We did not domesticate wheat, it domesticated us” (p. 81). Harari suggests that the life of members of the Sapiens species as nomadic hunter-gatherers was rather good. So then he asks, “How did wheat convince Homo Sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable life?” (p. 81). 

The agricultural revolution, Harari writes, was accomplished by wheat. He says it was “History’s Biggest Fraud” (p. 77); capital letters at the beginning of each word. Yes, a joke, and Harari can be witty. But what’s behind the joke? 

Might one say that Harari is a genetic determinist? He is unusual among historians in that he centres on DNA. He says our ancestors started by being a small and obscure group, who lived in Africa. Now we have taken over the planet. He explains this in terms of genetic variations that separated us from our chimpanzee cousins. Then, he says, came three revolutions: first cognitive, then agricultural and, more recently, scientific. It was, he says, with the cognitive revolution that we became able to construct stories, myths. Then, because of these, we humans became able to cooperate not just in gangs of eight or ten, like patrolling chimpanzees, but in groups that can number thousands, as in the Peugeot company, or millions as in USA or the Catholic Church.

By 2014, when the English translation of Sapiens came out, Harari seemed not to have read Keith Stanovich’s book, which came out ten years earlier, The Robot’s Rebellion. As Stanovich explains, many people, with Harari seemingly among them, think that members of a species have genes, which they then pass on to their offspring. But Stanovich points out that they have this the wrong way round. Genes have us as their vehicles. Genes direct these vehicles toward reproduction, so they can replicate. That’s what genes do: self-replicate. They use the bodies of plants like wheat, and of animals like humans, as vehicles to evade dangers, to survive long enough to reproduce, so that the genes can replicate. In this way, the information they contain, in their patterns of DNA, go forward in time. Genes program the vehicles that are plants and animals. 

Our next step, as humans, Stanovich suggests, is not just a revolution but a rebellion. We humans have become the first genetically engineered vehicles that do not need simply to be controlled by genes. By thinking, by imagining possible futures, by making plans, by cooperation with others, in some aspects of life we can choose for ourselves what to do. Although we are robots of our genes, to think and to choose for ourselves has become our collective rebellion. We have started to direct ourselves, and not just in such matters as birth control.

And how do we do that? It may be helped by writing and engaging in fictional stories, about possible states of our human world. So in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke asks Tertius Lydgate: “What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” (Ch. 72, p. 789).

George Eliot (1871-1872). Middlemarch: A study of provincial life. London: Penguin (current edition 1965).

Yuval Harari (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Toronto: Penguin Random House.

Keith Stanovich (2004). The robot's rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Research Bulletin: Reading Slows Signs of Cognitive Decline in Dementia Patients

With an aging population, many have looked into ways to prevent or slow the process of cognitive decline. Researchers at the University of Perugia were interested in whether reading and engaging with fiction could serve as an intervention for those living with dementia, based on the idea that narrative fiction engages a wide range of brain areas. 

Bartolucci and Batini (2019) conducted a longitudinal study examining the effects of listening to, and discussing, texts. Their outcomes included various cognitive abilities, including memory, attention, language, and visuospatial abilities. Participants, suffering from dementia, were assigned to either the experimental group or a control group. The participants first completed a set of neuropsychological tests. Then, the experimental group was read aloud to for 20 minutes, 5 days per week, for 14 weeks. In contrast, the control group followed their usual schedule for each day and time.

Initially, participants in the experimental group were read very simple texts, short in length and only consisting of short sentences. As time went on, texts were included that contained longer and longer semantic units. The duration of the texts also became longer, so that the stories could not be completed in one session, requiring participants to remember what occurred during the previous sitting. After 40 sessions, both groups completed the same set of neuropsychological tests. After one month had passed, the experimental group participated in an additional 30 sessions. After which, both groups again completed the same set of neuropsychological tests. 

These researchers found that scores for the experimental group increased for measures of immediate and delayed memory, visuospatial skills, and attention. The experimental group also performed better on some subtests of their language measure, including prose memory and word learning. These results demonstrate the power that reading and engaging with stories have with respect to our cognitive abilities. Story activities require us to use our own memories and personal experiences to understand and experience text, a useful and effective exercise for those living with dementia. 

Reference:  Bartolucci, M., & Batini, F. (2019). Long term narrative training can enhance cognitive performances in patients living with cognitive decline. Educational Gerontology, 45(7), 469–475. doi: 10.1080/03601277.2019.1658384

Post by Laura Bandi

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).

Can Children's Storybooks Teach Morality?

Although storybooks have long been used to teach moral messages to children, most research suggests that young children do not actually extract the intended meaning of these stories. However, a new paper by Walker and Lombrozo (2017) found that children may be more capable of extracting the moral from a story than previously thought. The researchers conducted two studies to see if children are better able to discern the moral of a story if they are asked questions throughout the reading process. The idea is that children need help directing their attention, so guidance from an adult may help them better comprehend the important aspects of a story. 

To test this idea, 5 and 6 year-old children were read stories that had a moral. As the story was read, children were either asked to recall surface details (e.g., "was Jocko sad?"), asked to explain an event (e.g., "why was Jocko sad"), or were simply told the lesson (e.g., "Jocko was sad because…"). Afterwards, the children were asked what the moral of the story was, and if they could name other stories with similar moral lessons. Children who were asked to explain the events of the story were better able to extract the story's moral. In the second study, the children asked to explain the story were also better able to apply the lessons to a real life example.

These two studies suggest that children can extract moral lessons from stories at much earlier ages than previously thought, but that they may need a little help. A key insight is that parents may be able to aid their children by asking questions about the story that direct their attention to important plot points, such as character motivation. Although more research is necessary to understand why these kinds of questions help children, these studies highlight the importance of interactive learning and provide promising evidence that storybooks may be more educational than previously thought.

Walker, C. M., & Lombrozo, T. (2017). Explaining the moral of the story. Cognition, 167, 266-281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.007

Post by Joseph Hoyda.

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail). 

Research Bulletin: Videogames May Enhance Cognitive Abilities, But Only For Those Who Play a Lot

Studies on whether playing videogames improves cognitive abilities have often found conflicting results. Nash Unsworth (Oregon) and his colleagues (2015) point out several methodological and statistical limitations in past studies showing that videogame players have better cognitive abilities than non-videogame players. For example, many of these studies compare the most experienced videogame players with non-videogame players, ignoring those in-between. By excluding those with moderate levels of experience, very small sample sizes are left and this can cause all kinds of problems. 

To improve on past work, Unsworth and his colleagues (2015) did two studies based on large samples, using many different cognitive measures, and examining both extreme groups (experienced versus non-gamers) and the full range of videogame experience. In Study 1, 198 participants completed various measures of cognitive abilities along with a videogame experience questionnaire. The extreme-groups analysis, which included only 47 participants, found that gamers outperformed non-gamers on many of the cognitive ability measures. These results are consistent with other studies that use this same method. However, when looking at the full range of participants, very few associations were found between videogame playing and cognitive abilities. In a second study, 466 participants completed very similar measures to those used in Study 1 and a similar result was observed: there were few associations between videogame playing and cognitive abilities.

These studies provide important insight into the question of whether videogames can improve cognitive abilities. It may be that associations between videogame playing experience and cognitive abilities only occurs for those who play very frequently. In addition, it may be that the genre or type of videogame is important. Future research will hopefully help to clarify these issues. 

Posted by Riana Fisher

References

Unsworth, N., Redick, T. S., Mcmillan, B. D., Hambrick, D. Z., Kane, M. J., & Engle, R. W. (2015). Is Playing Video Games Related to Cognitive Abilities? Psychological Science, 26, 759-774. doi:10.1177/0956797615570367

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).