Page 125 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

114 D. ROSKOS-EWOLDSEN, B. ROSKOS-EWOLDSEN, F. DILLMAN CARPENTIER

to the boys on the high school basketball team in Hoosiers. However, if the
mental model had been organized around the story of Blue Velvet, viewing
Dennis Hopper in a different context would be much less likely to activate
that mental model.
At a more general level, the mental models approach provides a flexi-
ble framework for an academic understanding of the media. In particular
it has three useful characteristics. First, mental models exist at many levels
of abstraction. If you are a reader of mysteries, you might have a mental
model for Agatha Christie novels, more specific mental models for her
Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries, and maybe more specific mental mod-
els for specific stories from the Poirot or Miss Marple series. A second
characteristic is that new information can be integrated into existing men-
tal models. A person’s mental model of Shrewsbury, the setting for Ellis
Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries, could be updated as more information
is provided about Shrewsbury and the abbey where Brother Cadfael lives
(Wyer & Radvansky, 1999). Similarly, rumination about the content of a
mental model would result in updating the mental model (Zwaan & Rad-
vansky, 1998). A third characteristic is that mental models can represent
both static situations, such as the mental model of the town of Shrews-
bury (what Radvansky & Zacks (1997) refer to as states-of-affairs models),
and dynamics situations that are evolving, such as the mental model of a
specific mystery that is occurring at the abbey (what Radvansky & Zacks
refer to as course-of-event models).
Several lines of research on mental models corroborate their usefulness
for understanding the media in general. Research has found that the mix
of linguistic and pictorial information improves the construction of men-
tal models (Glenberg & Langston, 1992; Wyer & Radvansky, 1999). For
this reason, the media should be particularly effective at influencing the
construction of mental models. In addition, research has shown that pre-
viously created mental models will influence how new information is
interpreted, and that they will influence the mental model that is con-
structed to understand the current event (Radvansky & Zacks, 1997; Wyer
& Radvansky, 1999). Finally, as already discussed, mental models can
vary in their degree of abstraction, so frequent viewers of a particular
genre should have richer abstract mental models that are appropriate for
understanding the nuances of that genre. Indeed, research has found that
the mental models that people construct are dependent on the genre of the
story they are reading (Zwann, 1994). Thus, genre differences that are
found in media studies may well reflect the types of mental models that
people construct of the media event.
The mental models approach also provides a framework for explaining
how individuals understand the media. In particular, the mental models