What was the main question in your dissertation?
Humans have many social-cognitive abilities, such their ability to empathize with another person and to see the world from someone else’s perspective. In my dissertation, I investigated the relation between these abilities and reading stories. At first thought, these two seem to have little to do with each other. After all, social-cognitive abilities are the skills we use to interact with others. Reading, on the other hand, is a rather solitary activity. Nevertheless, some studies, scattered over different scientific fields, such as literary studies, psychology, and linguistics, suggested that the way we understand and relate to other people and the way we read stories are interrelated. So, my dissertation focused on two research questions: how does reading stories affect our social-cognitive abilities and, vice versa, how do our social-cognitive abilities affect how we read stories?
Can you explain the (theoretical) background a bit more?
The best way to understand the link between social-cognitive abilities and story reading is by thinking of stories as social simulations. Stories focus on the experiences and perspectives of people, namely the story characters. In that sense, stories are small reflections of real-life social experiences. And so, to understand stories we need to make sense of the social experiences they describe and the characters living them. That means that we do not only use our social-cognitive abilities to understand people we meet in our daily life, but we also rely on them to relate to characters we meet in the stories we read. If that is true, then perhaps by reading a lot of stories we train our social-cognitive abilities, just like a pilot improves their flying skills by training in a flight simulator. This idea led me to my first research question: how does reading stories affect people’s social-cognitive abilities?
We can also wonder the reverse: if we need to use our social-cognitive abilities to make sense of characters and understand stories, then surely how good we are at understanding others in real life must also impact how we relate to stories. That is exactly what I studied in the second part of my dissertation.
Why is it important to answer this question?
Studying how reading stories strengthens our ability to understand others teaches us something about the evolutionary basis of stories. Of course, reading stories can be great fun, but by investigating how stories can enrich our social-cognitive abilities, we start to see stories as not just a form of entertainment, but as tools that can affect personal lives as well as society.
In addition, the second part of my dissertation shows that reading is not just about recognizing words on a page – it involves much more. When we read a story, we connect with the characters, understand their emotions and relate to their perspectives.This is important because it teaches us something about how language interacts with other processes, such as emotion and social interaction.
Can you tell us about one particular project (question, method, findings, implications for science or society)?
The most time-consuming but also most rewarding study I conducted was an eye-tracking study for the second part of my dissertation. By measuring eye movements I wanted to study if participants’ social-cognitive abilities affect how they read a story. In particular, I focused on words of the story that describe what the characters perceive (e.g., see, smell), think (e.g., thought, idea), and feel (e.g., love, anger). Participants came to the lab and read a 5000-word story in the eye tracker. I also measured their social-cognitive abilities with a bunch of tasks. For example, I asked them to rate their tendency to see things from someone else’s perspective in daily life. As a more objective measure, I also had participants compete in a game in which they had to tell me as fast as possible how many circles were visible in a picture of a room either from their own perspective or from the perspective of a person in the picture. Some people find it very hard to constantly switch between their own perspective and someone else’s perspective in this game and are slowed down, but people who are very good perspective-takers are much faster at this.
When looking at the reading behavior of my participants, I found an interesting pattern. The people who reported to be frequent perspective-takers in daily life and excelled at my perspective-taking game processed the words in the story that described characters’ inner worlds much faster. For example, they were less likely to look back to these words after reading them for the first time.
This study shows that social-cognitive abilities play an important role in reading stories, specifically in making sense of the characters’ perspectives.
What inspired you to choose your research topic?
As a linguistics student I loved studying the tiniest bits that make up language: sounds, syllables, words, sometimes sentences. But after a few years I felt like zooming out and instead of looking at the tiniest building blocks, I gained an interest in studying the complex works of art we can build with them. That is how I ended up with my supervisor, dr. Roel Willems, who had just started a research group dedicated to studying how we process stories and poetry at Radboud University.
What was the most rewarding or memorable moment during your PhD journey?
In 2021 I won an award (Christine Mohrmann Stipendium) that allowed me to visit prof. dr. Raymond Mar at York University in Toronto (Canada) for three months. I had just spent almost two years doing my research from home due to the Covid pandemic, which was quite a lonely and demotivating experience from time to time. Spending these months in Toronto was such a wonderful way to rekindle my motivation and inspiration. I was embedded in an amazing community of lab mates and even made some new friends. I was also able to carry out a study with professor Mar that eventually became a part of my dissertation.
What do you want to do next?
That’s a good question. I’m actually still contemplating what I would like to do next in my career. Ideally, I would like to work for an organization or company that builds bridges between science and society. I have loved doing fundamental research on reading, but now that I know how important and enriching stories are, I would like to put that knowledge into practice.
