Abstract:
In today’s media-saturated environment, defined by widespread smartphone use and accelerating globalization, the delivery of content through visual narratives has become the prevailing norm. Individuals encounter narratives in nearly all areas of daily life, from professional settings to recreational activities, whether reading the morning newspaper, following a work presentation, or interpreting airplane safety instructions. The ability to comprehend narratives is a fundamental cognitive skill across the lifespan and has therefore long been a central focus of research.
Despite the extensive body of work, a limited understanding remains of how pervasive life factors, such as stress, health conditions, and lifestyle-related influences, shape narrative comprehension. As these factors become increasingly prevalent in contemporary society, understanding how individuals process and navigate narratives is not only theoretically important but also of growing societal relevance. Thus, the central question of this dissertation is how narrative comprehension and inference generation are shaped by long-term and short-term influences, as well as by factors such as age and education. Across three empirical chapters, the studies presented in this dissertation provide insights into the mechanisms underlying narrative comprehension and examine how these mechanisms are modulated by these diverse influences. A central focus throughout is the role of aging.
After introducing the theoretical overview of this dissertation, Chapter 2 investigates the role of long-term protective factors (physical and mental activity, social connectedness) and risk factors (depression, anxiety, chronic pain, long-term stress, poor sleep) as well as the role of age, education, and modality (textual vs. pictorial) for narrative comprehension. The results indicated a general advantage for pictorial over textual narratives, although this effect decreased with age. Narrative comprehension was largely resilient to age, education, and long-term protective and risk factors. Performance correlated with memory but not with other cognitive abilities, highlighting its specificity within the broader cognitive domain.
Chapter 3 examines the effects of acute, short-term stress on narrative comprehension in different age groups. The results revealed that acute stress negatively affected visual narrative comprehension in younger adults, whereas the comprehension performance of older adults remained stable. Similarly, younger adults reported lower confidence in their responses under stress, while older adults’ confidence levels were unaffected. These findings highlight the interplay between visual narrative comprehension, stress, and aging, suggesting that with advancing age and experience, individuals may develop more differentiated event schemas that render their comprehension processes more resilient to acute stress.
Chapter 4 examines how acute stress affects the generative processes involved in narrative comprehension, thereby offering a more comprehensive understanding of how stress shapes this cognitive function. The findings revealed that inference generation, in contrast to inference recognition, remained stable across both age and education groups and was unaffected by acute stress. These results highlight the resilience of generative and creative cognitive processes, even under challenging conditions, and suggest that the ability to construct coherent narrative connections may be particularly robust to short-term stress.
Overall, these findings support a view of narrative comprehension as both dynamic and resilient. On the one hand, comprehension appears to be fundamentally stable across the lifespan and largely resistant to chronic influences, indicating that well-integrated cognitive systems help maintain coherent meaning even in the face of age-related changes. On the other hand, comprehension is sensitive to short-term situational factors in specific ways. For instance, inference recognition processes are affected by acute stress in younger adults, whereas inference generation remains largely stable across all age groups under stress. This distinction suggests that different cognitive mechanisms support different components of narrative comprehension. Recognition relies more on immediate retrieval and evaluative processes, making it more vulnerable to external influences, while generative processes involve constructive integration and creative elaboration, rendering them more resilient even under challenging conditions. From an applied standpoint, the findings endorse the use of pictorial materials in diverse contexts and provide important insights for fostering age-inclusive participation and for guiding educational systems.
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