Understanding Stories Through Morals and Remindings

Abstract

This paper examines the role of both episodic memory and abstract planning knowledge in narrative comprehension. Many narratives are memorable for the abstract planning advice they contain, usually in the form of failures which narrative characters experienced during either planning, or plan execution. The planning advice, or moral, contained within such stories is often expressed in terms of sayings, or cultural adages, which then effectively characterize these stories. These same planning failures also provide indexing structures for both the storage and subsequent retrieval from long-term episodic memory of narrative episodes involving similar errors in planning. Consequently, when people encounter similar episodes (either in real life situations, or vicariously in narratives) they experience spontaneous remindings (Schank 1982) of related stories which illustrate the same moral. A theory for extracting the moral of a story, along with remindings of related episodes, is currently begin designed and developed in order to extend the theoretical and practical scope of the BORIS(Dyer 1983) story understanding program.