Remembering apparent behavior a study of narrative

REMEMBERING APPARENT BEHAVIOR: A STUDY OF NARRATIVE MEDIATION Brady Wagoner * Abstract The present experiment systematically investigates the role of narrative templates (Wertsch, 2002) in remembering To stimulate the construction of a diversity of narratives I used Heider and Simmel’s (1944) celebrated “apparent behavior” film, in which geometric shapes moving around a screen are seen by subjects as agents involved in a kind of story Which narratives are used, as well as the “strength” subjects used them with, is then compared with what subjects remember and how they remembered it The relationship is not conceived causally (as if one variable determined or predicted another) but rather as constraints on an agent’s constructive potentials My analysis involves attending to both general trends found across the sample, as well as the particularities of single cases, especially atypical cases In other words, I use patterns found at the level of the sample to choose which subjects to attend to in the idiographic analysis Generalization still moves from single case to general model and back to single case, but the movement is facilitated by analysis at the level of the sample as a whole Cultural psychology has shown us how higher psychological functions are necessarily mediated by social tools or “artifacts” (Cole, 1996) For example, we control our remembering with the aid of concrete mediators (such as knots on a rope, photographs of family and home, daily planners, computers, etc.), as well as more general, abstract and “imaginative” mediators (such as social conventions and narrative schemas) In another experiment (Wagoner and Gillespie, in preparation) I found participants using the narrative templates of Hollywood ghost stories to help them understand and remember the foreign Native American story War of the Ghosts, made famous in Bartlett’s (1932) studies In the present chapter, I follow up on this finding by systematically investigating how different narrative resources organize remembering in different directions For example, how the use of a domestic conflict narrative template guides * Aalborg University - Denmark 221 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume the remembering of a number of ambiguous happenings differently from a playful teasing narrative template To empirically explore this question I drawn on the methodological ideas outlined in my paper “The experimental methodology of constructive Microgenesis” (Wagoner, 2009): First, I argued that experiments should look at the (cultural) means by which subjects performed the experimental task—in other words, attending to the process rather than simply the product or outcome of the task This requires an analysis of subjects’ novel constructions, which cannot be seen from coded and quantified data Second, attempts to exorcise meaning from the laboratory have failed There is no such thing as “experiments in a vacuum” (Tajfel, 1972) in psychology: Subject’s arrive in the laboratory with a personal past, ideas about what a psychological experiment entails and cultural means of dealing with what they think they should be doing Instead of trying to remove ‘outside influences’ (such as social norms, beliefs and narratives) from the laboratory, we should develop ways of studying them in action Third, rather than conceptualize a subject’s responses as directly caused by the manipulation of some variable, we can reconceive them as the creative constructions of agents, and interpret them in relation to agents’ personal history and their participation with different social groups Fourth, an analysis that moves between single cases and aggregates can overcome some of the limitations of each In this analysis single cases are given primacy because an analysis of systemic functioning is only possible at the level of the single case However, aggregate analysis can be fruitfully used to generate questions to look at in single cases, help identify which single cases to explore and provide additional resources for interpreting single cases In the present chapter, I will focus especially on how to bring this fourth point into practice Before getting into the details of present experiment, I will first briefly outline how narrative and remembering have previously been studied in psychology The narrative mediation of remembering Research on the role played by narrative in remembering goes back to, at least, the social psychologist Frederic Bartlett (1932), who used whole narratives, among other meaningful material, in his experiments on remembering He is most famous for showing the transformations that ensued in the Native American ghost story War of the Ghosts as it was repeatedly reproduced by Cambridge students The story came to look more like an English story: canoes became boats, foreign names disappeared, the supernatural elements dropped out and the whole narrative structure was adapted to English conventions—in Bartlett’s (1932) words the folk-story was “conventionalized” In contrast to storage theories of remembering which took memories to be discrete units inscribed on the mind/brain, Bartlett theorized that participants were guided by evolving generalizations of past experience—what he called ‘schemata’, ‘organized settings’ or ‘active developing patterns’ Schemata were understood as holistic developing patterns used in the service of the present to help an organism act in its environment Following Halbwachs (1925) notion of “social frameworks of memory”, Bartlett thought that 222 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation most human schemata developed out of participation in various social groups— social groups, for example, have characteristic ways of constructing stories Bartlett’s concept of schema was not taken up by the next generation of psychologists It was not until the “cognitive revolution” of the 1970s that psychologists began to use the word “schema” again But for the cognitive psychologists schema came to mean something quite different For example, Mandler and Johnson (1977) utilize Bartlett’s story War of the Ghosts to show that elements of a story that not fit into a “story schema” are omitted in later reproductions Their concept of story schema differs from Bartlett’s version in two significant ways: first, story schemas are separated from action by locating them in the head, whereas Bartlett’s use of the concept situates it in the organism-environment interaction Second, in contrast to Bartlett’s description of schemata as evolving cultural formations, Mandler and Johnson’s (1977) story schemas are more abstract and considered to be the same for everyone in all cultures and historical time periods This difference reflects competing conceptions of the discipline of psychology going back to its foundations (Farr, 1996): mind as an unchanging universal versus mind as interdependent with society and therefore varying among societies and historical time periods This is not to say that there are not universals, such as remembering through narrative, but rather the cultural means (e.g schemata) by which this is done will not be universal This second conception of psychology has recently been revived in the sub-discipline of cultural psychology (Boesch, 1991; Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1996; Shweder and Sullivan, 1993; Valsiner, 2007; Wertsch, 1991) For Bruner (1990), and several other cultural psychologists, narrative is a social medium that carries folk-knowledge and transforms individual psyches In one study, Bruner and Feldman (1995) interviewed members of three different theatre groups and found distinctive patterns in the narratives told for each group—for example, actors belonging to a group with closed membership and common principles tended to use we in their narratives of their individual and the group history, whereas members of another group that emphasized personal growth tended to use I and they Similarly, Wertsch (2002) distinguishes between specific narratives (involving particular people, places and events) and schematic narrative templates (from which particular narratives are constructed) He shows how Russian students’ accounts of world history are organized by schematic narrative templates, such as the story genre triumph-over-alien-forces, which is applied to events as different as the Second World War and the Civil War of 1918 Americans would use a very different schematic narrative template in order to construct specific narratives about the events of World War II In short, schematic narrative templates are tools of mediation generated between and distributed among members of a social group, and as such will vary between social groups Thus, as Halbwachs (1925) and Bartlett (1932) theorized much earlier, an individual’s construction of the past is intimately related to the social groups to which he or she belongs and the resources these groups provide Unlike Bartlett and cognitive psychologists, cultural psychologists, on the whole, have tended not to use experimental methods to explore how schematic narrative templates are used in remembering One exception to this was a replication and extension of Bartlett’s experiment on the repeated reproduction of War of the Ghosts I conducted using pairs of participants remembering together in conversation (Wagoner and 223 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume Gillespie, in preparation) In this experimental study I made the conjecture that participants were using schematic narrative templates developed from Hollywood Ghost Films to resolve ambiguities in the Native American folk-story: for example, why the main character did not feel sick when he was hit with an arrow, what he means when he says “[the warriors] are ghosts” and why the sudden ending “he was dead” A number of well-known Hollywood movies (e.g The Six Sense and The Others) both conclude with a surprise ending in which the main character recognizes that he or she is in fact a ghost Without realizing it, three out of ten pairs of participants drew on narrative templates exemplified in these films in order to make the unfamiliar Native American story intelligible In sum, more than eighty years after Bartlett conducted his experiments I found participants using very different cultural resources (e.g Hollywood movies) to remember the story War of the Ghosts – thus, illustrating the intimate link between the variability of mind and the varying tools of mediation The present experiment systematically explores how the use of different schematic narrative templates guides the interpretation and remembering of the subjects who actively employ them Agency, thus, here means that subjects cannot be treated as billiard balls moved in different directions as a result of influences purely outside of themselves, but, rather, they are themselves active centers of causality constructively moving towards their own future goals (Harré, 2002) The question becomes one of exploring the constraints on subjects’ constructive potentials As such, in my analysis I will avoid direct causal claims – such as this narrative resource leads to x – and instead highlight the constructive role of subjects using these resources, as Bartlett and Vygotsky had done much earlier (see Wagoner, 2011) To experimentally trigger, access and analyze the use of schematic narrative templates I use Heider and Simmel’s (1944) apparent behavior film, which invites a number of different narrative constructions In this way, I can compare the varieties of narrative resources employed to solve the task of narrating the film after a time delay, thus creating ambiguities in memory This comparison will involve attending to a number of narrative dimensions, including their form, content and source Through this analysis I will work towards a general model of how narrative is used in remembering and how it in turn shapes this process Method Materials The present experiment employs Heider and Simmel’s (1944) now classic “apparent behavior” film In the film two triangles and a circle move around the screen in relationship to each other, and to a rectangle, which “opens” on one side (see figure below).1 The film was originally created to study “which stimulus conditions are rel- 224 The original film can be watched at: http://anthropomorphism.org/psychology2.html Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation evant in the production of phenomenal movement and of determining the influences of the surrounding field” (p 243) They found that the perception of animate (i.e intentional) movement (which all their participants experienced) is organized around “the attribution of the origin influences” (p 259) For example, we might perceive one shape either chasing or following another; in the first case the shape behind is the origin, while in the second case the first shape would be It is around these “causal centers” that the whole field is structured Figure An image of the geometric shapes in Heider and Simmel’s (1944) apparent behavior film T = big triangle t = little triangle c = circle What is left undiscussed in their theorizing, though so obvious in the presentation of their data, is the rich variety of narratives constructed by participants to make sense of the film Little is said about how these narratives provide the “structure” upon which any attribution to the shapes can be made That is, Heider and Simmel (1944) not theorize the (sociocultural) frame through which an attribution becomes meaningful.2 For our purposes of exploring the role of narrative frames in remembering, the film provides an exceptional tool: (1) it has been shown to generate a diversity of narratives and (2) these mediating frames are likely to be fore-grounded in participants’ linguistic descriptions This is the case because the task involves story telling (in whatever frame subjects see fit) rather than a reproduction of material in the same medium, as we see in Bartlett’s repeated reproduction experiments In other words, the film must be described in language for the first time by the participant and there are no restrictions on what language can be used – the object and events of the film can be referred to in any number of ways “Cross-modal remembering” (Edwards and Middleton, 1987)—that is, vision, touch or taste into language—such as this, is relatively rare in experimental research on memory, even though it is probably the most common kind of remembering in everyday life (cf Bartlett’s ‘method of description’ in Remembering) Heider does explicitly explore this topic several years later in his classic book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958) 225 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume Participants Participants were recruited by word of mouth and through a message sent out to the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences e-mail list at the University of Cambridge Participants’ ages ranged from 16 – 37 Of the twenty participants in my sample fourteen were students at the university, two were young lecturers, two were students preparing to enter university and two were working in a non-academic environment In the course of the experiment I had the chance to learn more about their background and interests through casual talk in-between stimulus presentation and recall Rather than a bias this information was essential to interpreting participant’s reproductions Bartlett (1932, p 15) comments, “If the experimentalist in psychology once recognizes that he remains to a great extent a clinician, he is forced to realize that the study of any well developed psychological function is possible only in the light of consideration of its history.” Procedure Each pair of participants3 was brought into the lab and seated at a table where it was explained to them that this was an experiment about what and how people remember After obtaining their written consent, they were shown the Heider and Simmel (1944) film on a notebook computer This was followed by a forty-five minute delay, in which they first filled out a demographic questionnaire, and then, for the remaining time, we discussed topics unrelated to the experiment After the time had elapsed one of the participants was asked to leave the room for a few minutes The remaining participant was then told to, “Tell me what happened in the film in as much detail as possible” These instructions were deliberately minimal so as to leave open how the film would be narratively framed by participants and thus create a diversity of responses Heider and Simmel (1944) used a similar question in the first condition of their experiment Subjects’ narration of the story was video recorded The interview Participants’ reproductions were followed by a short individual interview in which I asked them: (1) about their understanding of the film, (2) their “experience” of watching it and of narrating it, (3) its relationship to the meaningful narratives they produced, (4) their attributions of the shapes, (5) any other comments they had, and (6) about their personal history which might help me to understand their interpretation of the film The questions were at first open, and then more focused if the participant left some relevant topic unanswered Several additional questions were directed at probing their ability to elaborate a coherent narrative for the film—for example, “why did t x” Once the interview with the first participant was completed, the second participant 226 A pair was used because I originally intended to test the two participants together after a week to explore how the two renderings were negotiated in conversation This design was made unworkable by the fact that participants near universally discussed the film together upon leaving the experiment Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation was invited to re-enter and to the same task, while the first waited outside The informal interview as an integral part of the experiment was common in the pre-World War II era of experimentation (Wagoner, 2009), though it has largely been abandoned today (or perhaps replaced by a questionnaire) It provides a wealth of background knowledge about the participant’s personal history, interests and feelings during the experiment As such, it is an essential resource for interpreting participant’s processes and productions (see also Moscovici, 2007) Here, participants’ personal history and character is used to help interpret participants’ reproductions, rather than exorcise them from the laboratory as Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) tried to Results and analysis Five interrelated analyses are carried out: First, I calculate which parts (discrete events) are remembered and which are forgotten Second, I consider the different meaningful wholes (narratives) which participants brought forward in order to make sense of the film Third, I move to the analysis of single cases in order to see how these parts and wholes are systemically related in the process of remembering Fourth, I return to the sample as a whole to analyze how the strength of narrative framing effects how much is remembered and transformed Fifth, I seek out individual cases that break this group trend and explore them idiographically What events were remembered and forgotten? In the first analysis, the film was segmented into 24 events (see table 1) This was an expansion of Heider and Simmel’s (1944) original division into 12 events and their anthropomorphic descriptions of them Every participant’s narration was then coded for included and excluded events This technique of analysis has been common in memory research, at least, since it was used by Mandler and Johnson (1977) for the recall of stories Any identifiable reference to the event was accepted, regardless of the narrative adopted My aim was to capture, generally, the most and least salient events in the film, what was most remembered and forgotten, regardless of how the participants understood the film Salient events (i.e., those that tended to be remembered) should help us identify which aspects of the film a narrative must be mapped unto, when participants break the norm (by not remembering an event most others did) and, finally, analyze what led to the atypical case The distribution of remembered events approximates Ebbinghaus’s (1885/1913) serial position effect which predicts the likelihood of an item being remembered according to its position in a list (see figure 2) However, I will argue that this is only a partial explanation.4 Events 11 and 17 are in the middle of the sequence but are still remembered at a high frequency, whereas event 23, second to last in the sequence, is remembered by no one The reason these events are included and excluded has more to with their particular effect on the participant and how they are interpreted to relate to other events To take an obvious example, to tell a coherent narrative, event 11 (“c moves out of the house”) must be included if there is an earlier event in which c goes into the house and a later event in which c leaves the frame Similarly, events 22 and 24 are highly remembered because they suggest narrative closure, whereas event 23 does not 227 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume An explanation for the high frequency with which event 17 is remembered is less obvious My guess is that it stands out because of the emotion it evokes in participants Other events, such as “T and t fight” (4) and “T hits the walls of the house” (24) were also emotional and highly remembered To see these events as emotionally tense the participant must understand them as events in which the health of animate beings is at stake, whose future possibilities are threatened, whose desires might be thwarted Thus, their inclusion can be interpreted as showing rudiments of a narrative, seeing the film as actions not simply as motions Figure The ‘Serial position effect’ first reported by Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) The percentage of nonsense syllables recalled is a function of their serial position in a list Those at the beginning and end are remembered with the greatest frequency Much more of the film is omitted or forgotten in the reproduction than remembered For example, it was rare to see participants commenting on the opening, closing or slamming of the door, probably because it was inessential to their narrative As already mentioned the majority of the events in the middle of the film (event to 21) are forgotten, and when they are remembered they are often placed in the wrong order For example, several participants mention that T could not open the door but this event is followed by a different event to the one in the original, like T getting angry and breaking the house In the third analysis (below) we will see that almost all major changes to the events occur in the middle of the sequence In sum, events are not perceived in isolation; they come into a structured relationship with each other It is to the different wholes that we must now turn, in order to see how they are put into relation with these parts (i.e., events) 228 Table Events of the film described anthropologically for simplicity of presentation, and events remembered for each participant (T = big triangle, t = little triangle and c = circle) HSLVRGHVLQ+HLGHU6LPPHO¿OPSDUWLFLSDQWV 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 T closes door to the house 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 t and c appear and move near the door 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 12 T T moves out of the house toward t 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 17 7DQGW¿JKW7ZLQV 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 15 16 'XULQJWKH¿JKWFPRYHVLQWRWKHKRXVH 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 7PRYHVLQWRWKHKRXVH 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 And shuts the door 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 7FKDVHVFZLWKLQKRXVH 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 c moves toward the door 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 10 t opens the door 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 11 c moves out of the house 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 12 12 t and c close the door 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 13 7WULHVWRRSHQWKHGRRUEXWGRHVQRWVXFFHHG 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 14 WDQGFWRXFKDQGFLUFOHHDFKRWKHU 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 15 $QGPRYHDURXQGWKHRXWVLGHRIWKHKRXVH 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 16 7RSHQVGRRUDQGFRPHVRXWVLGHWKHKRXVH 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 17 T chases t and c around the house 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 10 18 7ORRNVLQVLGHWKHKRXVH 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 19 WDQGFKLGHEHKLQGWKHFRUQHURIWKHKRXVH 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 20 t and c move around the house 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 21 T moves around the house 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 14 22 WDQGFOHDYHWKH¿HOG 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 23 T slams the door 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 24 7KLWVWKHZDOORIWKHKRXVHVHYHUDOWLPHVWKHZDOOVEUHDN 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 16 7RWDOQXPEHURIHYHQWVUHPHPEHUHG 8 10 10 5 10 11 10 6WURQJV :HDNZ Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume purported incongruity with the character of T – no participant thought of T as female When I brought up this suggestion to other participants I got the same response of laughter, as when Rebecca suggested it to herself Second, we see Rebecca spontaneously identifies the rectangle as a “house,” even though she called it a “square” in the beginning of her narration She then retracts it with the vaguer term “construction” In all, Rebecca seems to attempt to be neutral in her description but continues to get caught in her own meaning-making This is typical of many participants; though they criticized or laughed at themselves for anthropomorphizing, they continued to it just the same Rebecca was also the only participant to remember that T closed the door in the beginning My speculation for its inclusion here is that in describing the scene, as most participants begin by doing, she stumbles upon “the door was open,” which then stimulates her to recall the first event of the film This is a case of self-stimulating remembering through speech, where ideas come to us in the flow of speaking Similarly, Rebecca is not fully aware of the meaning of the use of “He,” in the above, until she says it Hearing her own utterance stimulates a response to the unintended “surplus of meaning” (Gillespie, 2006) carried in the word “He” Her utterance appears uncomfortably gendered, which she rectifies by calling it a “she,” but with a laugh With both Dorothy and Rebecca, as well as with the others in the strong narrative framing classification, we find a coherent narrative structuring their experience and recollection of the film, a detailed and accurate memory for the events, well developed social relationships among the shapes, consistent characterization of shapes, and the use of highly anthropomorphic language, for which they self-reflect on at various points in their narration, but continue to use it nonetheless Weak narrative framing The next participant, representing the weak narrative framing, reported having a rather different experience of the film, in which one part was particularly vivid in relation to a narrative but not so for the majority of the film It was typical for participants in this classification to project powerful visual imagery on an event in the film, but the imagery did not extend throughout For example, Cathy (participant 12) described seeing two fish in an aquarium at the point where T and t “are fighting” near the bottom corner of the rectangle: There was a house-like structure with two triangles and a circle in the picture And hmmm, the the hmmm the triangles were trying to escape and I think they escaped together And, ahhh, the ball went inside the house And before that there was a bit of an altercation between the triangles It looked like the bigger one was attacking the smaller one So, hmmm, yeah, so c went inside the house And there were a lot of movements And at one point it looked like fish in the aquarium And the bigger fish was attacking the smaller fish, down by the bottom of the house And I’m not sure what the ball was doing at that 234 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation point, but ah, I think it was inside the house And then the triangles went back inside, through the top And did some stuff in there [laughs] Ah, it is impossible to this without personifying everything So, they went through the house, which is obviously the point It looked like the ball came out of the house again, the triangle, one of the triangles followed the ball And the T inside the house suddenly went mad and started breaking it down And it was just breaking the structure apart at the end And that’s as much of a narrative I can impose, on a non-people situation Cathy’s description is much patchier than the first two cases we explored Afterwards, she comments that she saw the film as “many sporadic dramas” rather a single unified drama like the above participants Events in the film stand out to her as meaningful but she struggles to bring them together The relationship between the triangles goes from them being a part of the same group to being in an antagonistic relationship: At one point “the triangles were trying to escape […] together” and further down, “the bigger one is attacking the smaller one” These two events seem completely unconnected Vague statements like “there were a lot of movements” and “[c] did some stuff in there” break up continuity between events The temporal movement of her description also jumps around as she attempts to place different events She inserts “an altercation between the triangles” before “the ball went inside the house” only after remembering the latter The patchy narratives affect the content of what is remembered Cathy confabulates by reorganizing events and applying the same event (in the original) to two places in her reproduction Her confabulation that “[The triangles] escaped together” is interesting in that some narrative of entrapment – in the rectangle as indicated by “the triangles went back inside” – and escape from it seems to be guiding the production of this idea It comes up again later in her reproduction when she says, “So, they went through the house, which is obviously the point”.5 However, these narratives are never elaborated (in the reproduction or in the interview afterward), nor does she seem to use it to understand other events in the film Notice also how Cathy utilizes the event of the triangles being inside in two places in her reproduction, and in both they seem to act as a group, in unison, even though they are said to fight later This is left unexplained The ending, in which T “breaks the structure apart”, is inserted after t and c leave the rectangle and T is still inside, whereas in the original this ending occurs when T is outside and presumably can’t find t and c Our next participant, Charles (participant 6), refers to the shapes with anthropomorphic terms, but does not fully develop a narrative which he applies to the entire film Instead, several events in the middle of the film – where the shapes appear to be in direct conflict with each other – stand out as gladiators in a colosseum, though this Ebbinghaus’s serial position effect can help explain why the first events of the film are so highly remembered A purely narrative explanation of this is incomplete as well because while watching the earliest events of the film subjects have likely not discovered a narrative 235 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume is not applied readily to other portions of the film in his reproduction Nonetheless, I had trouble classing this participant as offering a single narrative or many narratives The end still seems to belong to the conflict situation that he has represented the film by However, when pressed to elaborate his account he was unable to So, there was two triangles and a dot It started out with all three objects in a box and, I think so Anyway, the bigger of the triangles was chasing around the smaller of the triangles And, actually, they were all outside the box, and consequently c was able to – because the other two were preoccupied with each other – to go around them and into the box Eventually, the bigger triangle got distracted by the dot and started chasing it around and corned it in one of the corners inside the box, sort of like a gladiator [pause], a lion It sort of reminded me of a colosseum – it was nice and round, Christendom lions and Hmmm, anyway, somehow, somehow the dot got out of the box I think it was because t came in the box and distracted the other triangle Anyway, there was a lot of chasing around the box And eventually, the dot and t manage to trap T inside the box Then it got frustrated and destroyed the box after the other two had run off Charles changes order of events so that t and c trap T inside box after they have been chased around the rectangle, not after c leaves the rectangle as in the original Rarely is this event included at all in participants’ reproductions The new plotting of the event must fit both what comes before and after in the narrative sequence Charles is clear that t and c were being chased before – a situation that could be remedied by trapping the chaser His emplotment is also able to make sense of the event that occurs after the trapping: T gets frustrated by what happens to him and breaks the rectangle As with Cathy, we also see in the middle of Charles’ narration the emergence of vivid imagery Shapes suddenly appear to be like a gladiator and a lion Cathy sees “a bigger fish attacking a smaller fish” The attachment of strong visual imagery to particular events in the film was a relatively common occurrence among participants, especially in the weak narrative framing classification In all cases it seemed to apply to only a portion of the film Non narrative framing Federica (participant 11) used very little intentional language, though she still remembered five events of the film Instead of understanding the film as a story, she made it meaningful through her training as an engineer The shapes become meaningfully ordered as geometric forms in space, and not in their relationships with each other However, this does retard her from remembering some of the more specific movements of the film as well as remembering the events in the original order So there was a parallelogram and one of the edges was kind of a little door 236 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation And so I think T fell from the top and then went into the parallelogram and sort of hovered around And then you have two more shapes falling from the top, a small t and a c And then they started falling a bit further down And the door opened and T came out and t came in And the triangle and the dot kept moving down towards the southeast corner of the screen And there was lots of movement; they started moving back and forth t inside the box was also moving And then I think the sphere [c] went in And, this could be completely wrong [laughs], and so the sphere went in and the door closed And I think, then the triangle came out, the small one, and it got attached at the bottom of the parallelogram, the point facing east And then it started moving up across that side And then it came out And then, sorry, the ball came out And T got attached and started moving And then the t and sphere started to disappear from the screen And then T got into the parallelogram and started breaking the sides And the parallelogram kind of decomposed and that was the end of it Her reproduction is somewhat difficult to follow The shapes not form any meaningful social relationships together, except t and c seem to enter and leave the film together This is the only participant that calls c a “sphere,” which has a more technical connotation than circle or even “dot” Additionally, she is the most inconsistent about the name she gives it, using “sphere,” “dot” and “ball” at different times The events are disjointed as well They only make sense in terms of spatial relocation, e.g “t came in… [t] came out” Movements in which there is no significant spatial relocation – such as “the fight” between T and t, the cornering of c by T, and the reunion of t and c – are seen by this participant as mere noise There are no more refined categories for describing this change of place than simply “movement” or “moving” Her multiple additions to the sequence of events are also worth noting “T fell from the top,” “T came out and t came in,” “the triangle came out, the small one, and it got attached at the bottom of the parallelogram” She has confused who is in the rectangle and at which times Different events get completely mixed together Consider the original in relation to the reorganized sequence in her reproduction: Original Reproduction T comes out T and t fight c goes in t is left at the bottom of the parallelogram T enters t opens the door c exits T comes out t goes in T and c move to bottom of the screen c goes in t comes out t is at the bottom of the parallelogram c exits The placement and movement of shapes have interest only in themselves, not in relation to other placements and movements Without a narrative framework to guide her she is still able to remember many of the events but radically reorganizes them 237 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume The reorganization does not happen in the next case we will consider only because the participant does not remember enough of the film for this to occur The last participant we will consider, Susan (participant 10), did not seem to impose any meaning on the film aside from the basic shape categories and non-intentional verbs, like “collapse,” “whizzed” and “bashing” The one exception might be “hitting each other” used to describe t and c’s reunion; however, even this categorization is referred to in simile and is unconnected to any other event in the film As a result of not meaningfully framing the material, the shapes’ movements appear arbitrary and she is unable to recall much of the events therein I don’t remember very much of it At the start I think there is a rectangle and the triangle sort of bashed into the rectangle and made part of the side collapse in And sort of whizzed around And then I really don’t remember a lot of the middle of it There must have been Definitely, at some point another triangle and a circle and they were sort of bashing about, like hitting each other And then I remember the very end when the triangle and circle kind of disappeared and the original triangle bashed around the rectangle and broke it into little pieces What most participants describe as “opening the door” she describes as “the triangle sort of bashed into the rectangle and made part of the side collapse in” Where most participants saw meaningful actions between intentional beings she saw “whizzing” and “bashing” When most participants understood a reconciliation between t and c, she understood that they “were sort of bashing about, like hitting each other” Susan’s comments after the film are revealing She says, “It is kind of difficult to remember because it is just shapes There is like no interest to them They are just shapes So it was hard to remember because a lot of the movement was quite repetitive.” Without coming to understand the film through narrative, metaphor or schemas one event is indistinguishable from the next, the sequence is random and the movements are without purpose Her characterization of events is of the same actions happening throughout A rectangle collapses and shapes bash about “There just seemed to be lots of shapes hitting each other generally The rectangle, the size of it, seemed like it was collapsing in and out, back into shape, several times But it’s not the most interesting image to remember.” Again, without meaning there is no interest and no vivid imagery develops Here is a case in which little “effort after meaning” (Bartlett, 1932) can be found, and consequently the object of memory is undifferentiated and unintegrated Strength of Narrative Framing In running the experiment with the first few subjects I quickly discovered an influential factor at work in subjects’ remembering It seemed that the stronger the narrative framing – that is, the level of meaningful elaboration of the material given in order to 238 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation synthesize it into an integrated whole – the more complete and accurate the reproduction would be To further explore this relationship I began to classify participants as being strong, weak or non- narrative framing The first step in classifying them was a judgment about their reproduction as a whole: if the whole film was consistently described by a single elaborated frame (e.g as domestic conflict between mother, father and child) I preliminary placed them in the strong classification, while if they used multiple frames, they were classed as weak narrative framing The two subjects who described the film in an almost entirely “geotechnical language” and who reported having not considered the shapes to be animate at any moment were classed non-narrative framing These classifications were starting points to be tested in the interview phase of the experiment The interview occurred immediately after the participants had narrated the story They were first asked the open question, “How did you interpret the film?” Most subjects revealed in their answer that they saw the film through a single narrative, multiple narratives or not as narrative (i.e., as inanimate shapes) Those who did not were specifically asked to classify themselves into one of these three groups I then asked them to elaborate on the meaning of the film as they saw it A subject in the strong narrative framing class would be able to tell a story for the whole film with consistent characterization, developed relationships between shapes and with intelligible motivations for actions For weak narrative framing subjects such integration of the film did not occur Table Frequency distributions of the number of events remembered (left) and number of transformations (right) for strong, weak and non-narrative framing strong weak non strong weak non 1 1 1 0-2 3-4 5-6 7-8 9-10 11 2 The classification of each participant can be found in table 1, along with the number of transformations to the film made in the reproduction and the total number of events remembered for each participant “Transformations” refer to three kinds of changes introduced by participants in their reproductions: (1) the order of events is changed, (2) a shape is added or subtracted from an event, and (3) an event not in the original is added Table provides frequency distribution of the number of events remembered and number of transformations for the three classifications of narrative 239 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume framing We can see that those with strong narrative framing tend to remember slightly more events than those in the weak narrative framing classification (table on left) As to the number of transformations (table on right), only one participant (out of ten) who adopted a strong narrative frame had more than one transformation (the exception will be analyzed below) and in all but two cases the transformation was an addition of an event The others reordered an event None confused which characters belonged to which event In the weak narrative framing classification two or more transformations were common The non-narrative framing is difficult to compare with the other two because we only have two quite different participants to work with (i.e., Susan and Federica), both of whom were analyzed in depth above Susan did not remember enough of the story to elaborate and transform her text, whereas Federica remembered almost as many events as the average participant in the weak narrative framing classification (i.e., events), but transformed the text more than any other participant in my sample By contrast, what seems to block the act of remembering for Susan (to say nothing of accuracy) is not the use of a particular narrative per se but the rejection of any narrative, meaning or interest With Frederica, who is without a narrative guide, though not without a meaningful framework, the individual events suffer much transformation Analysis of atypical cases As part of my methodological credo, I must attend to the atypical cases that not entirely conform to the general trends and analysis seen in the last section If we look back to table we find individual cases that break the general rule of strong narrative framing = more events remembered and less transformation of events, when compared with weak narrative framing In some cases less transformation of the story can be explained by the minimal length of a participant’s reproduction – this can be inferred from the number of events remembered – as was the case with Susan (participant 10) Still, three atypical cases remain We have already seen above how Charles (participant 6) remembered ten events and transformed two It was explained that he was on the border between the two classes, which would justify his scores Two other cases still need to be further explored: Participant and participant 13 Though neither would fit the alternative class particularly well either, it will strengthen my case to explain why they not quite fit their classification An atypical case of strong narrative framing Participant 2, Clarissa, in the strong narrative framing class, remembered eight events, which was only slightly less than the average number of events remembered within her classification (i.e., events); however, she was the only participant in this class to transform three events Let us look at her highly elaborated anthropomorphic narrative: 240 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation There was an angry triangle in a box That hmmm opened the door to his box and had a look outside and found a little triangle and a circle, looked quite playful And then he started, pointed his little triangular face at them And they seemed quite alarmed and kind of being pushed away and then there, it seemed like they were tricking him a bit Then the other triangle [T] opened the door to his hatch and snuck into his box and was in there for a while And then, came back outside again And in the mean time, the baby triangle had been pushing the circle around for a while And at that point, I think, T went back into the box and came out again There was a lot of movement and c went into the box T followed him in There seemed to be a lot of force at the point So whenever T pointed its pointy face c kind of got displaced to a different corner of the box, in quite swift non-jagged movement c left the box and T peered its head out and t and c disappeared off the scene And then T seemed to get really angry and frustrated and smashed his box apart with his pointy face Clarissa’s account has many of the features of a strong narrative framing There is consistent characterization: She explains afterward that T was “a grumpy… quite old guy” and the other two were “young playful characters” (It should also be noted that Clarissa was the only participant to refer to c as male) These characters get cast into a master narrative centering on the single conflict of the youth joking around and agitating the old (in the old man’s territory) It is a kind of Denis the Menace (well known American cartoon) narrative, in which Denis is always causing trouble to Mr Wilson, on his own property, while Mr Wilson becomes increasingly angry and frustrated The form of antagonism in this narrative is only surface deep – Denis and Mr Wilson are in reality quite attached It is thus highly significant that Clarissa later comments, “at the end when they [t and c] left the scene all together and T starting smashing his walls down I thought that he was actually quite upset that they’d gone I think he missed them, despite it all.” We get the sense from Clarissa’s narrative that T wants to be left alone, whereas both t and c enjoy teasing him after they get over their initial alarm T angrily pushes them away when they disturb his peace and quiet and once they are out of the way he returns to his own activities in his box, though he remains agitated Thus we can explain many of her omissions: she says nothing about the fight between T and t outside the box (as nearly all the other participants do), nor anything about the chase between T and the smaller shapes (which over half of the participants mention something about) For her the conflict must be understood as arising from t and c’s interference in T’s life and is settled as soon as T pushes them out of his space For this reason she is clear in the interview that c was just as confrontational as t, which was a rare attribution among my sample Now that we understand the form and logic of her narrative, how should we understand the transformations that occur in it? Clarissa includes two cases of T entering and then exiting his box alone In the original this occurs only once after T has chased the other two shapes Also in between these two events she inserts “the baby triangle had 241 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume been pushing c around for a while” It is hard to know what to make of this attribution of conflict – Clarissa is the only participant to think of t as “pushing” c around here My reading, based on her whole narrative framing, is that she interprets event 13 (t and c’s reunion) as playful fighting and includes it at this early point However, it could also be argued that the event was a mixing up of who had which roles in the fight between T and t In any case, all three of these transformations fit her general narrative of T only being aggressive to a point – t and c are also held responsible for causing trouble Additionally, the transformations help her to avoid including events that would not easily fit her narrative frame, like T’s fighting with t at a distance from the house and c moving away from the conflict In fact, she makes the transition out of her confabulation to the event where c enters the box with the very vague expression “there was a lot of movement,” as if to cover up the unknown event Similarly, c’s entering is interpreted as motivated not from fear (which is the common causal connection made by other participants), but is rather another form of joking—that is, playing with T’s things In sum, it appears that Clarissa both omits and transforms the film because she adheres too closely to her general narrative frame, which does not schematize the sequence of events as accurately as other narrative frames, such as bullying or a territory conflict An atypical case of weak narrative framing Participant 13, Mike, is in several ways an atypical case: First, though classed as weak narrative framing he remembers ten events, though transformed two Second, he claims in the interview to not have seen the shapes as meaningful actors yet in his narration we see unmistakable attributions – such as “chasing” and “vicious”– used several times As I explained above, I still classed this participant in the weak narrative frame because he seemed to be using character attribution and was able to elaborate a coherent story when tested in the interview So to start there was the large T and the rectangle which opened T opened the part at the top right of the rectangle and it went in It was moving, I think at the same time it was going in The small t and c appear on the screen And they were swirling about And T came out of the rectangle and started bumping t Around this time I think c goes into the rectangle, through the door Hmmm, then the, oh yeah, and t goes in the rectangle, followed by T which is chasing it I’m not sure what happened Hmmm, in which case, the, I’m not sure where t is But the c is in the rectangle and T goes, T and c are definitely in the rectangle c when chased by T escapes And then I think T is still in the rectangle And c and t are outside And they kind of bump into each other but it is not as vicious as the T and t interaction Hmmm, then, I think I might of missed a bit, but then the, they then disappear off the screen and T leaves the rectangle going back to the original state But then at one point it seems to go back into the rectangle through the door, which has been a consistent part of the play But now the door of the rectangle is the only bit of the rectangle 242 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation that is movable T seems to take apart the, or it bumps into the side of the rectangle, and the rectangle collapses or disintegrates We see Mike fluctuating between non-descript narration and an anthropomorphic one; first, he talks about “swirling” and “bumping” which mere objects can but then lapses into an intentional animate language of “followed,” “chasing” and “escaped” Later, he clearly identifies the part of the rectangle that moves as a “door” In the interview he comments, “I was trying not to think of it as a story I was trying to think of it as an interaction between inanimate objects”— an intention in which he in part fails It appears that the participant is trying to save face by avoiding what he perceives to be the experimenter tricking him into seeing the film as something it was not Mike was involved in a social psychology course at the time where he came in contact with experiments where participants were deceived by experimenters Thus, this becomes a kind of framing resource for him in completing the task It is difficult to say what kind of narrative Mike might have had in mind while he watched and while he remembered the film As such I cannot fully explain this particular case within the general model I have developed above Discussion Narrative type and strength in relation to material I have highlighted two different dimensions of narrative frames – their “strength” and “type” (e.g a domestic conflict) Narrative as a mediator transforms experience of some material in the direction of a well-structured temporal sequence, with consistent characterization (e.g stable descriptions of the agents and object), developed relationships between agents and with intelligible motivations for actions The degree to which this is done has been called “strength of narrative framing” Participants in the strong narrative framing category tended to reproduce more events of the film overall and transform less of the film However, we should be careful about using this finding to make inferences about single cases, where variables are not isolated from the whole By analyzing atypical cases, we find that what seems to be a general trend for the classification only holds true for certain (typically used) narrative types which fit the content of the film Strong narrative framers, such as Clarissa (above), employ a narrative frame that more easily lead to transformations in remembering the events of the film Thus, these two properties of narratives as mediators of remembering (i.e., strength and type), as well as the material they are put to work on, must be considered together, as an integrated whole, when assessing their effect Any one of these factors in isolation of the others cannot reliably predict the direction in which remembering will unfold This is because particular narratives can reveal and conceal happenings, transform and stabilize our experiences, constrain and enable our remembering depending on when and where they are used 243 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume In short, different narrative types are “schematized” (Werner and Kaplan, 1963) to different material in qualitatively different ways (i.e., differing degrees of strength) Changing any one of these components will simultaneously change the functioning of the others With regard to material, random movements between the shapes (e.g see Oldmeadow and Wagoner, under review), rather than Heider and Simmel’s well structured sequence of events, would likely be less effectively remembered using strong narrative meditation We would expect the random material to be highly transformed in reproductions in order to give them what the Gestalt psychologists called “good form” The agentic construction of narratives Narratives, like speech, are always partially used and partially invented, partially borrowed and partially constructed anew They are borrowed in the sense of being made out of existing social meanings, tools and conventions It was often possible to trace narrative frames back to the social groups the participants belonged to (e.g the “sheep trail” and “territory conflict” narratives) or social activities they had recently participated in (e.g the psychometric testing frame) Also, in a separate run of this experiment on a group of school children, I found a much more persistent use of a single narrative frame—bullying This group was more homogeneous and organized around more set activities than my adult sample The relationship between the social group and the narrative frame used is not, however, a directly causal one: it is still only through individual agency that narratives become mediators of remembering Cultural resources are actively used and shaped according to one’s commitment to a given task; narratives are appropriated by individuals with a history and personal interests to solve a problem in a concrete situation—in this case, to make ambiguous happenings meaningful in order to remember them Vygotsky and Leontiev’s famous experiment on mediated memory parallels this experimental setup (see Wagoner, 2009) In their experiment children were instructed to remember a list of words, too many words for them to recall with the “natural” memory alone However, in one condition of the experiment they also provided children with picture cards, which they could give meaning to in order to stimulate their memory for the target word later on Vygotsky’s (1987) idiographic analysis of this data revealed that children constructed narratives to link target words with pictures, which they then used to remember the target words later on when given the picture In the present experiment, subjects gave a narrative meaning to the film in order to remember the sequence of events later on Like Vygotsky’s analysis, understanding which narrative was used can explain transformations occurring at recall—for example, one child in Vygotsky and Leontiev’s experiment formed the narrative “they shot the lion” in order to remember “to shoot” with the help of a picture of a lion; however, the child remembered “gun” instead (p 182) Similarly, it is likely that Dorthy (participant 1) is blocked from remembering how the film ended, by her constructed narrative, because of its incongruence with the ending, even though the vast majority of subjects (i.e., 16 out of 20) clearly remembered this event 244 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation Distinguishing narrative mediators I have already discussed narrative mediators along the dimensions of type and strength but there are other dimensions which have received less explicit treatment Participants draw upon a wide range of cultural resources to make the film meaningful Some participants employed narrative templates from the social groups to which the participant belonged, such as ‘bullying’ among the school children or ‘territory conflict’ for participant involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Others drew on narratives from entertainment media like the ‘gladiatorial games’, ‘a prison escape’ or ‘grumpy guy and playful kids’ The participant who saw the film as being like a psychometric test used in job interviews was having to these tests during the time period in which the experiment was conducted Finally, some narratives were developed from particular objects such as the tortilla chips and m&ms eaten by one participant just before the experiment The different source domains probably have different time-spans Narratives that could be traced back to participant’s upbringing (e.g ‘sheep trials’) were probably deeply embedded in participants’ thinking, whereas others might disappear once the participant moves on to another phase in their life (e.g ‘the psychometric test used in job interviews’), while others, still, would probably be totally situation specific (e.g ‘tortilla chips and m&ms’) Unfortunately, with only one reproduction I am unable to develop this idea any further here Linguistic categorization and physical transformation Subjects tended to see shapes as having similar physical characteristics when the shapes were attributed as having the same goals In contrast, shapes that were understood to be in conflict with one another were seen as being physically different Of the three dynamic shapes one is big, two are small, two are triangles and one is a circle The small triangle’s group membership is thus physically ambiguous From this perspective we can understand why no subject saw the c and T as belonging together, yet a few did understand T and t to be in the same group, acting toward the same end In the majority of cases, however, t and c were seen as one social group (i.e., acting together with the same interests) and T as another antagonistic social group (i.e., with different interests) It is interesting to note that c is often referred to as “little c” or “small c”, even though there is no need to distinguish c from the other two shapes; instead, the added adjective works to group c and t together, to emphasize their sameness and minimize difference (as well as to emphasizes c’s inefficacy) Tajfel (1959) long ago noted people’s tendency to exaggerate in-group similarities and out-group dissimilarities We are seeing a much simplified case of this here Before this grouping can be done, subjects must establish a narrative in which such a grouping makes sense When this condition is not met, the grouping of shapes does not occur Similarly, when actions and/or the dispositions of the shapes were said to be ‘aggressive’, certain physical characteristics would stand out to accord with this categorization When T was understood as being aggressive, it was simultaneously understood to be “pointy,” though if T was not seen in this way, no such characterization was given 245 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume Similarly, t was the same shape as T but didn’t become “pointy” until t was deemed partially responsible for the conflict, as was the case for participant 1, who was involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who saw the film as being about a conflict over territory In sum, narratives have the effect of changing the basic appearance of the shapes in accordance with the meaning given to them by the narrative Mediation by visual imagery We already have some indication of how narrative and linguistic categories transform subjects’ visual imagery of the shapes One subject commented that events stick out “when you think in metaphors” The metaphor/linguistic category imposes itself on our perception; it does not seem to be chosen in any deliberate sense The same subject goes on to describe how she saw and remembered the event in which T breaks the house: “it’s just the lines breaking but you see the whole thing fall down It’s in 2-D but you almost see it in 3-D” This subject has implicitly linked this event to the strongly framed narrative of “bullying,” and to T being aggressive and violent The parts are thus formed out of the whole (i.e strong narrative frame) This provides evidence for clear links between mediation by narrative and by visualization (see also Wagoner, in preparation) On the other hand, visual imagery often remained relatively self-contained for subjects who did not have a general organizing narrative This frequently occurred for the “fighting” between T and t, which almost everyone remembered A description of this scene was usually accompanied by gestures, in which subjects brought their thumb and figures together on both hands and proceeded to move the pointed ends together with quick rhythmic movements McNeil (1996) argues that gestures are a window onto the subject’s subjective visual imagery This would imply here that something about the scene catches the imagistic imagination and begs the subject to provide an elaborated meaning Imagery does seem to work closely with narrative and categorization but is not exhausted by this relationship Attending to gesture enables us to analyze imagery outside of linguistic categorization All subjects gestured at several points in their description of the video The majority gestured continuously throughout It is interesting to note that the gestures create imagery from the vantage point of the subject, as if they were watching the film a second time, not from the perspective of someone facing them For example, in laying out the setting, subjects often put the “house” on their left and the door on their right when gesturing in space If the gestures were to serve a communicative function we would have expected to see the opposite Less frequently, subjects would elaborate imagery with their fingers pointing to spaces on the table in front of them, but still these images were upside down from the point of view of the camera and researcher When narrating a social drama that we observed from an outside perspective, we often put ourselves in the perspective of a participant in the drama Using cartoons 246 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation McNeil (1996) has uncovered much first person gesturing in the narration of observed events In my research using written stories I have found the same (Wagoner, in preparation) For example, when in conversation about The War of the Ghosts one subject bent forward in her chair as she said, “I sort of remember them crouching down” In this way she actually becomes an active participant in the events of the story With the Heider and Simmel (1944) film as stimulus, this imagistic transposition of perspective seemed not to occur Even at points were the subject could communicate “pushing” in the film from a first person perspective, they always gestured as if it were on a screen in front of them One major difference between the two experiments is that subjects reading War of the Ghost had to construct their own visual images out of a story that was read, whereas here the subjects watch actions unfolding and must construct a narrative to make them coherent But this does not completely explain the non-existence of first person imagery—McNeil (1996) found subject’s gesturing from the perspective of a cartoon character when narrating what happened in the cartoon Thus, the shapes in the Heider and Simmel (1944) film are animate beings for most of the subjects, but possibly not quite animate enough for subjects to embody them in imagination Cross-modal remembering ‘Cross-modal remembering’ is the most frequent mode of remembering in everyday life (Edwards and Middleton, 1987) However, most memory experiments require only single-modal remembering Bartlett (1932) is an exception: his method of description was a cross-modal method Likewise, in the present experiment participants were required to remember a visual stimulus verbally Participants in the present experiment remembered much less of the stimulus material, when compared to my earlier strictly verbal experiment using War of the Ghosts (Wagoner, in preparation) On average individuals participants remembered more than 30 out of 42 units of War of the Ghosts, while participants in this experiment remembered only out of 24 That is 71.4% versus 29.1% respectively Of course, this is only a very rough comparison between two experiments which are not alike but it can give us a general impression of the information lost as the film’s visual material is schematized into a linear narrative form that can then be communicated In the case of a written story events are already segmented and we know exactly what should be included in our reproduction In the film things are more ambiguous; it is up to the subjects to impose an order on events and decide which are worthy of being included in their narrative account :VTLTL[OVKVSVNPJHSYLÅLJ[PVUZ In this experiment, data has been collected through both a controlled experimental procedure and semi-flexible interview Furthermore, both aggregate and single case analyses were employed to analyze the data Only by using these multiple sources of data and analysis was I able to arrive at an understanding of narrative that captures several dimensions of complexity For example, if I had left out the interview, it would 247 Yearbook of Idiographic Science Volume have been impossible to confidently identify weak and strong narrative framing as well as connect narrative frames to participants’ life outside the laboratory Or if I had only attended to aggregate data, the differences found between the number of events remembered and transformed for weak and strong narrative framing would be misleading Understanding the reason for these differences required analyzing single cases (in particular atypical cases), where the systemic relationship between type, strength and the material could be seen Moreover, single case analysis enabled the analysis to move beyond “experiments in a vacuum” (Tajfel, 1972), to begin to conceptualize the ways in which participants’ everyday lives and ways of thinking become operative within the context of an experiment Thus, a flexible interpretive process moves between levels of analysis and sources of data, in order to synthesize these different findings into a general theoretical model Conclusion: the many dimensions of narrative and methodology This experiment set out to explore the relationship between narrative resources and their operation in remembering, using an analytic strategy that works between single case and aggregate analysis All of the participants reported some kind of narrative understanding of the film, excepting the two analyzed above, though for many, narratives related to specific pieces of the film and not the film in its entirety An effective narrative allowed participants to make useful connections between events and agents, which could be drawn upon in their recall of the film However, as we saw above, narratives can misdirect as well as faithfully direct remembering, exclude as well as include, they constrain us as well as enable A number of systemically related factors (e.g narrative frame and strength) were identified as conditions for remembering, forgetting and transforming the events of the film I say “systemically” related because these factors cannot be considered apart from one another or the material on which they work By attending to atypical cases (e.g Clarissa), we see that it is not just a matter of strong and weak narrative framing, but also which narrative frame is used A strong “domestic conflict” narrative frame does not tend to produce transformations, nor as many omissions for this film This frame seems to map onto the sequence of events directly, whereas Clarissa’s “playful teasing” narrative frame can be used but requires a more active spinning of the frame to the sequence of events to make it work, which results in a number of transformations Thus, this study helps us to understand these different characteristics of narrative frames as mediators and how they are related in remembering A brief methodological note before closing: this experiment brought together the standard American analysis of itemized and aggregated data with the European pre-WWII focus on single cases and holistic psychological functioning (see Toomela, 2007; Wagoner, 2010) My analysis began at the aggregate level by first looking at what events (i.e., parts) tended to be remembered and forgotten by subjects Second, I outlined the diversity of “narrative frames” (i.e., wholes) used to understand and 248 ... Halbwachs (1925) notion of “social frameworks of memory”, Bartlett thought that 222 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation most human schemata developed out of participation... six cases represent, in order of appearance, strong, weak and non narrative framing Strong narrative framing Our first example is a strongly framed, highly elaborated narrative: There was a line... original order So there was a parallelogram and one of the edges was kind of a little door 236 Remembering apparent behaviour A study of narrative mediation And so I think T fell from the top and