Verb Memory and Text Comprehension

Kersten, Earles, and Berger (2015) reported a distinction between two kinds of motion representations. Extrinsic motions involve the path of a person or object, with respect to an external frame of reference. Intrinsic motions involve the manner in which the various parts of a person or object move. They found that intrinsic motions are encoded and remembered with the corresponding actor performing the motions in a unitized memory representation. Extrinsic motions are encoded as separate memory representations, making them more difficult to accurately associate with the correct actor. In the proposed experiment, I will examine the generality of this distinction in motion representation, and investigate whether the unitization of intrinsic motion with its corresponding actor occurs during reading comprehension tasks.