Do Readers Keep Track of Protagonist Identity in Narratives?

The purpose of this research was to further investigate conflicting findings in the literature regarding the processes readers use to maintain and update their mental representation of contextual information in text. Previous research suggests that the relevance of information to a protagonist’s goals in a story influences whether that information will later be validated (Levine & Kim, 2019; Levine & Klin, 2001; Lutz & Radvansky, 1997). Studies showing that readers overlook inconsistencies in contextual information (Albrecht & Myers, 1995; Smith et al., 2020; Smith & O’Brien, 2012) often involve materials where the inconsistent details are irrelevant to the protagonist’s goals. This study focused on the protagonist's identity, specifically their occupation. Passages included goal-irrelevant protagonist occupation information with manipulated consistency between two different mentions of the occupation in the story. The hypothesis was shown to be supported regarding reader’s disruptions whenever they encountered occupation information inconsistent with a previous mention. These findings indicate that readers will not notice an inconsistency when the inconsistency is small enough and similar enough to the earlier mentioned identity when it is irrelevant to the protagonist’s goal.