Can readers fully adopt the perspective of the protagonist?

Despite the centrality of the protagonist during narrative comprehension, evidence indicates that readers do not typically approach the text from the protagonist's point of view. Experiments 1a-1c demonstrated that both explicit task instructions and the first-person point of view resulted in comprehension being influenced by perspective-relevant information; this indicated that readers were adopting the perspective of the protagonist. However, Experiments 2a-3b showed that even when readers adopt the protagonist's perspective, they cannot do so to the exclusion of related perspective-irrelevant information. Results are discussed in the context of the RI-Val model of comprehension in which perspective-relevant information and perspective-irrelevant information are both available and compete for influence during comprehension.

Taking the perspective of the narrator.

Readers do not always adopt the perspective of the protagonist; however, they will under certain conditions. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that readers will take the perspective of the protagonist from the third-person point of view, but only when explicitly instructed to do so. Experiment 2 demonstrated that reading from the first-person point of view is a text-based manipulation that encourages readers to adopt the perspective of the protagonist. The results of Experiments 3a and 3b replicated the findings of Experiments 1a and 2. Experiment 4 established that simply increasing readers' attention to the text does not lead to adoption of the protagonist's perspective; moreover, this suggests that when it does occur, protagonist perspective adoption is not the result of increased attention, but strategic processing.