Narrative perspective and immersion in literary reading: Experimental evidence from behavioural and neural measures

This study examines how narrative perspective shapes readers’ experience of literary texts. Although immersion has often been treated as a central dimension of literary experience, it remains unclear how different narrative perspectives influence readers’ cognitive and subjective involvement during reading. To address this question, we conducted two complementary experiments that examined perspective effects at different levels of processing. Experiment 1 used a dual-task paradigm with single-standing paragraphs to investigate whether narrative perspective influenced readers’ allocation of attention during reading. The results showed that first-person narration elicited slower responses to concurrent auditory probes than third-person narration, suggesting greater attentional engagement during text processing. Experiment 2 extended the investigation to a short suspense story and combined self-report ratings, behavioral responses, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The results showed that self-report data indicated higher subjective engagement for first-person than third-person narration. At the neural level, second-person narration was associated with stronger activation than first- and third-person narration in regions linked to higher-order perspective-related processing. Taken together, the findings suggest that narrative perspective does not exert a uniform effect across measures, but instead differentially relates to attentional engagement, subjective involvement, and neural processing. This study offers a more fine-grained account of how narrative perspective shapes readers’ engagement with literary narratives.