The role of elaborative and schema processes in story memory

Three experiments examined recall for a story for which comprehension of some of its idea units required active construction on the part of the subject (letters were deleted from the words contained in one-third of the idea units). In Experiment 1, recall was significantly better for those ideas with letters deleted than for those with letters intact. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were instructed to adopt a particular perspective while reading the story. Recall of idea units was found to be an additive function of (1) an idea's importance to the perspective adopted, and (2) the letter-deletion manipulation. These results suggest a model of story memory that incorporates both elaborative-processing and schema-based mechanisms.