Do readers construct spatial representations in naturalistic story comprehension?

This study investigated whether spatial situation models are constructed in naturalistic story comprehension. The experiment featured a relatively complex, naturalistic text. When college students were given a normal reading instruction, they processed spatial information relatively fast and were relatively poor in verifying spatial inferences, compared to subjects given a spatial reading instruction. Additional analyses showed that the possession of a relatively strong spatial representation does not influence the processing and representation of subsequent spatial information under a normal reading instruction. Therefore, during normal reading, readers are not very much engaged in constructing, maintaining, and updating a spatial situation model.