Paul van den Broek, Patricia Bauer and Tammy Bourg

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Book review Paul van den Broek, Patricia Bauer and Tammy Bourg, eds., Developmental spans in event comprehension and representation: Bridging fictional and actual events. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997. x + 429 pp. $79.95 (hb.), $39.95 (pb.). Reviewed by Mark A. Casteel, Department of Psychology, Penn State University York, 1031 Edgecomb Avenue, 17403 York, PA, USA. E-mail: [email protected] What is an event? What are event memories? As is probably immediately clear to most readers, there is no simple answer to this question. An ‘event’ can be something as simple as dropping a fork, or as complex as understanding that a character’s wife in a story has lied to her husband and poisoned him in order to be with her illicit lover. Given the wide variety of situations that could justifiably be lumped under the heading of ‘event memory’, it probably comes as no surprise that psychologists studying event memory may well be relatively unaware of similar or related research conducted by their colleagues. Attempting to rectify this problem is really the main goal of this edited book. As the editors note in their preface, they hope to ‘build bridges’ by creating links among the work of different psychologists using different research paradigms, different methodologies, and different subject populations. Ultimately, they hope to articulate a more integrative view of how events are comprehended and represented in memory, literally from infancy through adulthood. As the editors note in the preface to the volume, this book is not the first to attempt to forge such links. In fact, Katherine Nelson edited the seminal work Event knowledge: Structure and function in development, which had a similar goal, and indeed, much of the work reported in the present volume was probably motivated and influenced by the original papers published in Nelson (1986). The present volume literally picks up where Nelson left off, and summarizes much of the work done in the last 14 years. Given the large advances that have been made in this field recently, this is a reasonable undertaking. In fact, Nelson authors the first chapter, in which she reviews what was covered in her original volume and then compares how the chapters in the current volume expand upon her previous book. The editors chose well in asking Nelson to write the introductory chapter, as it provides a sense of continuity to what was done earlier. The organization of Nelson’s introductory chapter is basically a ‘state of affairs, then and now’ approach which is valuable because it allows the reader to appreciate 0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter PII: SO378-2166(00)00024-2

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both the continuities and discontinuities between the older and the newer research. She comments on how her earlier research was motivated by the understanding that preschool children possess abilities beyond those predicted by Piagetian theory (the dominant paradigm at the time). In fact, she found that the cognitive context a child brings to a situation strongly influences the cognitive representation he or she develops. Furthermore, a child’s mental representation is also influenced by individual differences, a theme that has gained momentum in the intervening 14 years as evidenced by the number of authors in the present volume who also discuss this issue. What I liked most about Nelson’s chapter, however, was the review and critique she provided to each of the chapters in the volume. In fact, her chapter can be considered a mini review of the entire book, and truly sets the stage for the chapters that follow. After Nelson’s introductory chapter, the book is divided into three major parts. Part I, titled ‘Establishing event representations’, deals largely with methodological issues, although the chapter by Arterberry does discuss the very beginnings of event memory in infancy. This section begins with Michael Young’s chapter on connectionist modeling of event memories. Young is interested in how people develop personal theories of causality that are not generated from explicit teaching and learning. He has constructed a connectionist model representing the development of these implicit theories that emphasizes both bottom-up and top-down processing. One of his specific interests is whether the model will successfully engage in unique human behaviors, such as discounting (failing to seek new causes for an event in the presence of a known cause) and retrospective devaluation (editing beliefs about the causal nature of events in the face of new evidence). Although the outcomes of Young’s simulations revealed only partial support for his model, the approach itself represents one of the first attempts to model the development of our personal theories of causality. As such, it should be given serious consideration by those interested in this line of inquiry. My only quibble with Young’s chapter is that it seems relatively out of place when compared to the rest of the chapters in this volume (through no fault of Young’s). Little reference was made to his work by the other contributors to this volume, even in the final integrative chapter by the editors. This is unfortunate because his chapter may receive less consideration than it deserves. Martha Arterberry’s chapter is interesting because it examines ‘micro-events’, very short events that generally do not involve people or well-defined goals. She reviews work that shows that even young infants are sensitive to both spatial and temporal information. She then examines how infants are able to integrate spatial and temporal information and notes discrepant findings from two different experimental paradigms. Studies measuring an infant’s anticipatory looking suggest that the integration occurs fairly early, at least by five months of age. Research using apertures (where a stimulus is revealed through successive displays) suggests, however, that integration is not fully present until 12 months of age. Arterberry suggests that the discrepancy may be linked to the formation of qualitatively different types of memory. She suggests that anticipatory looking relies on associative forms of memories. Responding to an unexpected event (which is tested in the aperture paradigm) relies more on recognition, however. Furthermore, primate research indicates

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that the neurological areas responsible for these two types of memories are on different maturational timetables, with areas governing associative memories developing earlier. Arterberry suggests that while infants younger than 12 months can perceive events if they do not require the construction of representations, the perception of more complex and real-world events is not present until 12 months of age. Although Arterberry’s hypothesis is speculative (as she notes), it is nonetheless intriguing, and future work would do well to investigate her idea. The chapter by Lynne Baker-Ward, Peter Ornstein and GabrieIle Principe discusses the methodological difficulties inherent in studying children’s event representations, focusing particularly on the use of children’s verbal protocols. The authors suggest using three separate approaches to provide converging evidence on the underlying mental representations: (1) examining cues that differentially elicit a remembered event; (2) examining information that interferes with a remembered event; and (3) examining how various situations are able (or not) to successfully reinstate a remembered event. Baker-Ward et al. then discuss how the research they have conducted on memory for pediatric examinations fits within this three-tiered framework. This research makes an important contribution not only for its real-world significance, but also because it allows the researchers to disentangle memory for a routine (i.e., scripted) event from more episodic memories. A summary of the research of Omstein and his colleagues is beyond the scope of this review. Nonetheless, many of the findings discussed by the authors do suggest that even young children have memories for specific events, and that memories can be improved by situations that reinstate the events. Although some of the authors’ interpretations of the data are speculative, they are plausible, and future research would do well to address these ideas. What this chapter does very well is to discuss the many methodological difficulties involved in trying to examine the nature of event representations. It also shows the need for additional work in this area that is conceptualized from the very beginning with the aim of addressing the representational question. The chapter by Lisa Travis begins Part II of this volume, titled ‘Event understanding in early childhood’. Travis’ chapter is important because she presents new data on children’s early sensitivity to goal-based information. Travis discusses two experiments with very young children that relied on elicited imitation of event sequences. In this paradigm, children are shown a small number of behavioral steps required to produce a final goal. The initial states are not connected to each other, however, via temporal, causal, or enabling conditions. The children are then prompted to imitate what they have seen. Travis’ results are exciting because she found that 20-month-old children, and even some 15-month-olds, reproduced the sequences in the correct temporal order, showing their sensitivity to the goal-based nature of the sequences. At the end of the chapter, Travis contemplates what it is that allows young children to detect the goals. She proposes, based on work with older children and adults (i.e., van den Broek, 1989; van den Broek and Trabasso, 1986), that steps having the most causal antecedents are good candidates for goal status. She urges that additional research be conducted to see if the processes of building representations of

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complex texts are similar to those involved in building representations of simple physical events. This is sage advice, which is also echoed by the editors themselves. Patricia Bauer and Sandi Wewerka’s chapter represents an important contribution to this volume because it addresses the transition period between preverbal and verbal infants. One of the main premises of their research is that previous studies have examined young children’s event memories in highly decontextualized situations, where the children are reliant on their parents to provide appropriate mnemonic support. They suggest that contextualizing an event after a delay (by returning the children to the original situation and/or by providing props) may help very young children exhibit memory for that event even after fairly long delays. Bauer and Wewerka report findings from an ongoing longitudinal study that largely supports their thesis. Children as young as 13 months of age were found to remember an event over a span of one year. The finding that these young children spontaneously produced verbalizations about what they experienced up to a year before shows the beneficial effect of contextualizing the situation. When the children were tested again at 36 and 40 months, they still retained the event memories. Although verbal proficiency at an early age was not required for later event memory, it was related to it. The authors suggest that the early verbalizations about an event were facilitated by the contextual nature of their recall environment. Bauer and Wewerka’s research is important because it helps to bridge the gap between the development of verbal and nonverbal memories. The key for future research, as noted by the authors, is to determine exactly how context influences initial and subsequent recall attempts. In contrast to some of the earlier chapters that dealt with event representations of situations constructed by the experimenter, the chapter by Robyn Fivush and Catherine Haden deals with children’s representations of autobiographical memories. The first half of the chapter summarizes much of the work in this area from the two dominant perspectives : cognitive science and linguistics. Some of this work is contradictory, and the authors discuss some potential implications of these contradictions. The second half of the chapter discusses findings from the authors’ own longitudinal research. They are particularly interested in how children’s developing narrative abilities impact autobiographical memory. Between the ages of 40 and 70 months, children were interviewed repeatedly about personally experienced events. Even the youngest children exhibited coherent and cohesive narratives for these events. Nevertheless, older children produced richer and more complex narratives and utilized more complex temporal orderings, unlike the simple chronologies of the younger children. Fivush and Haden conclude that young children do have a rudimentary ability to evaluate events in terms of their personal meaningfulness. Nonetheless, this ability develops with increasing age and is linked to the development of narrative skill. Although this conclusion will not be universally accepted, their data certainly supports it. The chapter by Nancy Stein and Maria Liwag adopts a perspective that provides an interesting contrast to that of other researchers. The authors’ main premise is that children interpret events in light of their personal significance. As a result, developmental change will tend to look more quantitative than qualitative. They also argue

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that researchers need to attend more to children’s nonverbal cues as evidence of what they know. In the research summarized by Stein and Liwag, they asked parents to nominate recently experienced events that produced the four basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. The children were then queried about these specific events. Stein and Liwag found that from a very young age (2.5 years) children can clearly distinguish between these four emotions. Moreover, their emotions were appropriately tied to the goal outcomes (e.g., happy memories were associated with attaining a goal; sad memories were associated with goal failure). The authors conclude that young children’s memories of events are founded along the same important dimensions as older children and adults (i.e., goals, mental states, emotions). Although the authors’ primary findings are important, one of the findings that I thought was interesting was that the parents were not always successful at predicting their children’s emotions (they were especially poor at predicting anger and sadness). Stein and Liwag suggest that the parents tended to focus on the child’s immediate emotional reaction. The children, however, indicated that they continued to think about events long after the event was finished. As the authors imply, this finding should make us cautious. In addition to focusing on the difficulties young children have in knowing what others are thinking, future research should also consider the difficulties that adults have in knowing what other people are thinking (even their own children). The take home point, of course, is that we cannot rely solely on parental reports of children’s emotional reactions as gospel. This was an excellent chapter, and the point that there may well be more continuity in development than is generally believed is well taken. I do, however, agree with Nelson’s claim in Chapter 1 that although this particular perspective is appealing, it is probably also true that there are qualitative differences between the way preschoolers and older children think about emotional events. The task, therefore, is one of learning in what situations young and older children think in a similar fashion, and where they think about the same events differently (if at all). This chapter certainly provides some interesting food for thought. The chapter by Tom Trabasso and Nancy Stein extends the earlier work of Fivush and Haden (Chapter 6) and Stein and Liwag (Chapter 7) by examining children’s memory for causal connections in stories. Trabasso and Stein emphasize that children focus on the goals and plans of story characters to help discover the underlying causal connections. Children then combine this knowledge with what they know about the world to help remember events. This idea leads to an interesting prediction. If children use goal plans to organize their knowledge, then their memory for stories should resolve around episodes, and therefore exhibit little forgetting. Conversely, if younger children do not organize their memories around goal plans, then their memories should be more list-like and subject to serial position effects. Trabasso and Stem report some findings based on verbal protocols from preschool and second-grade children. The children narrated picture stories and then recalled the stories in the absence of the pictures. The authors found that during the narratives, both groups of children showed agreement on the basic story actions. Goals and causal relationships were frequently mentioned by both groups as well. Nonetheless, the preschool children did tend to use more descriptors and action statements than

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the second-grade children. The preschool children were also more disrupted by pictures that were out of order. The recall data is especially interesting because the preschoolers (but not the second graders) exhibited a serial position effect. This suggests that the younger children did not integrate the sequences as well as the older children, and that they were not as sensitive to causal connections as were the older children. For both groups, however, causal sequences did tend to be the ones most well remembered, so preschool children are obviously sensitive to causal connections. Trabasso and Stein conclude that although preschool children face limitations, they do use their knowledge of causal relationships and goals to assist in the encoding of information. The chapter by Elizabeth Larch and Rebecca Sanchez makes a unique contribution to this volume by examining children’s memory for televised events. Rather than event memories being medium specific, Larch and Sanchez argue that event representations generalize across media. In support of their thesis, Larch and Sanchez summarize research that shows that children between the ages of four and six are sensitive to the structural nature of TV stories (especially causal features), although younger children do remember concrete actions better than more abstract goals (consistent with the research of Trabasso and Stein). Young children are also capable of making local inferences that connect actions, but they do get better with age at recognizing causal connections among fairly complex story actions. Larch and Sanchez suggest that this age-related improvement is due to children’s developing ability to recognize the goals that motivate story characters’ actions. Toward the end of the chapter, Larch and Sanchez discuss how the research on televised sequences adds to what we already know about event representations. One of their most interesting points is that research with children suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) shows that ADHD children perform more poorly (compared to non-ADHD children) in remembering the causal connections among televised story events. Other research, however, has shown that ADHD children are actually better able to distribute their attention over a number of different activities (e.g., watching TV while playing with toys) without any decrement in their memory for the primary event (e.g., watching TV). Although highly speculative, Larch and Sanchez suggest that the difficulty ADHD children experience attending to causal connections may also explain their difficulty with social relationships (which the authors suggest is based on an understanding of cause and effect relationships). While this suggestion is consistent with the research findings, it is a bold statement, and demands additional research to determine its validity. It certainly does, however, provide an interesting avenue to explore. Part III in this volume, titled ‘Event understanding in children and adults’, begins with a chapter by Tammy Bourg and Stacey Stephenson. Bourg and Stephenson outline Bourg’s model of emotional experience, and apply it to explaining how readers understand and empathize with the emotions experienced by story characters. Bourg’s model proposes that readers focus on goals, attempts, and outcomes as cues to the emotions a character should experience. Additionally, goals, attempts, and outcomes with more causal connections should function as better cues. The authors then discuss the results of two studies using both sixth grade children and adults that

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largely support Bourg’s model. The only important developmental difference they found was that the adults thought reactions were more important than either goals or outcomes, while the sixth graders thought they were equally important. The authors suggest that this finding may reflect the fact that adults realize that reactions are really nothing more than a specific type of outcome. Although an interesting idea, this is a post-hoc explanation, and as such requires additional evidence. Bourg and Stephenson raise a very important point toward the end of their chapter. They note that while causal connectivity and particular event categories (goals, outcomes, attempts) were identified in their studies as important, they only accounted for small proportions of the variance. This is an important point because the significance of causal connections and goal relations is stressed by other authors in this volume as well (e.g., Stein and Liwag, Trabasso and Stein). Bourg and Stephenson urge future researchers to investigate other variables that may also influence event memory and suggest that a promising variable may be the content of the story. As the authors note, some events are more emotionally charged than others. This is a provocative idea, and one that should definitely be investigated. The main goal of the chapter by Paul van den Broek is to ‘bridge the gap’ between our knowledge of infant versus adult event comprehension. This chapter largely summarizes the work van den Broek and his colleagues have conducted over the last 15 years on children’s sensitivity to, and use of, causal relations in stories. His work has shown that even eight-year-old children are sensitive to causal structure, although they do give more weight to intra- rather than inter-episode connections. By the time children are 11, they seem to realize the importance of interepisode connections, and from that point on, little developmental improvement takes place. Van den Broek also summarizes a recent study that examined young children’s memories for Sesame Street sequences (van den Broek et al., 1996). In this study, van den Broek et al. found that four- and six-year-old children, and adults remembered sequences better if there were more causal connections. Both groups of children did, however, focus more on concrete actions in the story, whereas the adults remembered the goals and intentions of the protagonist. Van den Broek concludes that young children are much more tied to local, within-episode connections. As they get older, sensitivity to causal connections increases, and children begin to focus more on complex, inter-episode connections. Van den Broek posits, however, a remaining question: What causes this relative change in emphasis from local to global connections that occurs between ages 4 and 1 l? In order to address this question, he urges future developmental research to adopt a more process-oriented perspective than it has traditionally done in the past. This is a very good suggestion, and one with which I wholeheartedly agree. Chapter 13, by Charles Fletcher, Amy Briggs and Brian Linzie, summarizes work by Fletcher and his colleagues that examines the strategies readers use to construct a coherent event representation in memory, focusing specifically on the Current State Strategy (CSS). According to the CSS, readers keep active in working memory (WM) the most recent event that has a causal antecedent, but no consequence. The authors then discuss the issue of when readers engage in reinstatement searches to

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locate information not presently active in WM, and present the two theoretical extremes. The minimalist perspective argues that readers will only search long-term memory to maintain local coherence. If the text is locally coherent, no search of memory will be made. The constructionist perspective, however, grants a much more active role to the reader, and argues that readers construct highly elaborate encodings of stories. Fletcher, Briggs and Linzie adopt a middle-ground perspective, based on results from a study by Briggs and Fletcher (1993). Briggs and Fletcher found that a word expressing a character’s motivational goal was actually responded to faster (relative to baseline) after a topic shift away from the protagonist and then back again, even though the story maintained local coherence. These results suggest that long-term memory was searched to reinstate the goal information, which of course argues against the minimalist perspective. Differences were found, however, as a function of a reader’s WM span. Interestingly, high span readers made fewer motivational inferences than low span readers. They argue, based on Cantor and Engle’s (1993) proposal, that low span readers have less efficient retrieval mechanisms. This forces them to engage in more reinstatement searches in order to encode explicit actions, making them look more ‘constructionist’. High span readers can generally get away with focusing on local relations, although they can easily engage in reinstatement searches if necessary, making them look more like ‘minimalists’. The finding of WM span differences is interesting, as is the authors’ potential explanation of it. Nonetheless, more recent work by Engle and Rosen (Engle, 1996; Rosen and Engle, 1997, 1998) argues that differences as a function of WM span should only appear on tasks that focus on more controlled processing. Additionally, these sorts of tasks favor high span readers, not low span readers, as found by Briggs and Fletcher (1993). This raises the question of whether or not reinstatement searches are best considered as effortful (i.e., controlled) or more automatic. I am unaware of research that addresses this issue. As a result, although the present authors provide an interesting explanation for the pattern of data found by Briggs and Fletcher (1993), much more work is needed to tease apart the role played by WM on reading comprehension before I will be convinced. Chapter 14 is by Debra Long, Brian Oppy and Mark Seely. In this chapter, the authors summarize the work they have done on how adults relate events in a text to each other. They discuss the role coherence plays for most theorists in terms of determining which inferences will be generated by a reader. This, of course, leads to a discussion of the minimalist and the constructionist perspectives. The authors discuss research they have conducted examining the on-line nature of superordinate goal inferences. Their previous research suggests that superordinate goal inferences are generated on-line, which would argue against the minimalist perspective. Nonetheless, the authors do acknowledge that the minimalist perspective could explain their pattern of data by claiming that simple argument repetition (i.e., a character’s name) could allow readers to link distant propositions. The authors also discuss the resonance model (i.e., Albrecht and O’Brien, 1993; O’Brien and Albrecht, 1992) and point out how it shares many features in common with the minimalist perspective. Given the recent empirical support for the resonance model, the authors

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therefore discuss a study designed to answer two questions: (1) how powerful is the resonance process? ; and (2) is inference-making a low-level process, or is it a high level (i.e., constructionist) process? The authors summarize their own research (Long et al., 1996), which suggests that the resonance process is quite powerful and that inferences reflect fairly highlevel analytical processes. When readers were given an advance warning via a story summary about stories with surprise endings, they spent more time reading sentences that were critical to the surprise ending. The authors argue that the readers were maintaining global coherence at that point, and that reading slowed to allow the readers to make the connections (some of which spanned seven pages). Long, Oppy and Seely conclude by stating that their findings are more consistent with the constructionist than the minimalist perspective. I quite agree. This work is also important because it extends previous work using shorter passages, thereby providing more ecological validity to the conclusions. In many ways, the final chapter by the editors of this volume is the most important because it serves three critical functions. First, Paul van den Broek, Patrician Bauer and Tammy Bourg do a marvelous job of not only summarizing the discussions of each of the previous chapters, but more importantly of integrating all of the findings from the studies. This is especially valuable given the different ages studied, the different types of events studied, and the different methodologies used throughout these chapters. Additionally, when points of disagreement arise between the findings of separate labs, these authors attempt to discuss whether the findings are truly discrepant, or rather are probably the result of different emphases, materials, or methodologies. In most cases, they conclude that it is the latter. The second function served by this chapter is that the authors tie together all of the research (both new and old) presented in the book into a coherent developmental view of the progression of event representation from infancy into adulthood. The third and final function of this chapter is that the authors address the ‘what still remains to be done?’ question, and offer some suggestions that might not at first glance be immediately intuitive. Below I will comment on some of what I think are the more important insights they offer. As the authors summarize the chapters, they notice a common developmental pattern to event memory and representation that applies to all of the types of events studied except autobiographical events. This pattern is one where an emphasis on different event relations develops in the following order: descriptive to temporal to causal to goal-oriented to thematic relations. The authors also offer some conjectures about why the research on autobiographical memories (e.g., Baker-Ward et al., Fivush and Haden, Stein and Liwag) may have failed to show this pattern. I wholeheartedly agree with the authors that the consistency of this pattern is too great to be ignored, and I do think that this pattern reflects the developmental progression of the representation of event memories. As the authors note, future research needs to specifically examine whether this pattern also fits with developing autobiographical memories, especially ones that are not so emotionally charged. I also applaud the editors’ comment that most of the developmental work in this area has focused on the product of comprehension rather than the process.

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This product vs. process argument has been around for some time, yet, as the authors note, most developmental researchers have been somewhat slow to incorporate an emphasis on process into their research investigations. What is needed are studies that incorporate both aspects. The authors also mention the importance of examining the role individual differences play in event memories and representations. They discuss a number of potential variables that could reveal interesting individual differences, including differences in WM span, language production, and reading comprehension. Of these possibilities, I am most intrigued by the research on WM span. As mentioned earlier, Engle and Rosen (Engle, 1996; Rosen and Engle, 1997, 1998) have done some very interesting theoretical work recently on when WM should and should not influence discourse processing. Engle and Rosen argue that WM span differences between readers should only be evident on tasks that tap into effortful or controlled processes, because high span readers are more able to suppress inappropriate activations. Processes that are more automatic, conversely, should show little evidence of span differences. If Long, Oppy and Seely are correct in their claim that the global inferencing process involved in maintaining global coherence is best conceived of as a high-level, analytic process, then Engle and Rosen’s work suggests that differences might be found in global inferencing as a function of WM span. This would seem to be an interesting area to pursue. Overall, I think this edited volume represents an important contribution to the literature on event comprehension. I think the editor’s stated purpose of ‘building bridges’ was more than adequately met, not only by building bridges between researchers using different methodologies and subject populations, but also by building a bridge from the work presented in the present volume to that presented in Nelson (1986). In fact, any individual who simply wanted a quick overview of this research area would be well-served by reading the first chapter by Nelson and the last chapter by the editors. Although I am by no means advocating skipping the intervening chapters, the first and last chapter really do a marvelous job of introducing and ending this volume. My advice is simple: If you are at all interested in this area, buy the book.

References Albrecht, Jason and Edward O’Brien, 1993. Updating a mental model: Maintaining both local and global coherence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19: 1061-1070. Briggs, Amy and Charles R. Fletcher, 1993. The availability of protagonist’s goals in 2nd versus 3rd person narratives. Paper presented at the 34th annual meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Washington, DC. Cantor, Judy and Randall W. Engle, 1993. Working memory capacity as long-term memory activation: An individual-differences approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19: 1101-1114. Engle, Randall W., 1996. Working memory and retrieval: An inhibition-resource approach. In: J.E. Richardson, R.W. Engle, L. Hasher, R. Logie, E. Stoltzfus and R. Zacks, eds., Working memory and human cognition, 89119. New York: Oxford. Long, Debra L., Mark Seely and Brian Oppy, 1996. The availability of causal information during reading. Discourse Processes 22: 145-170.

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Nelson, Katherine, 1986. Event knowledge: Structure and function in development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. O’Brien, Edward and Jason Albrecht, 1992. Comprehension strategies in the development of a mental model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 18: 777-784. Rosen, Virginia and Randall W. Engle, 1997. The role of working memory capacity in retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 126: 211-227. Rosen, Virginia and Randall W. Engle, 1998. Working memory capacity and suppression. Journal of Memory and Language 39: 418-436. van den Broek, Paul, 1989. Causal reasoning and inference making in judging the importance of story statements. Child Development 60: 2X6-297. van den Broek, Paul, Elizabeth Larch and Richard Thurlow, 1996. Children’s and adults’ memory for television stories: The role of causal factors, story-grammar categories and hierarchical level. Child Development 67: 3010-3028. van den Broek, Paul and Tom Trabasso, 1986. Causal networks versus goal hierarchies in summarizing text. Discourse Processes 9: l-15.

Mark A. Casteel is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Penn State University, York Campus, York, PA, USA. His research examines the development of children’s understanding of inferences in text. He has also recently become interested in the role working memory plays in the inference generation process. He has presented numerous papers and his publications include manuscripts in Developmental Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and Journal of Research in Reading.