‘Gonna get you,baby!’ A qualitative-empirical study of attentional modulation in reading a short story

Abstract

How do individual readers determine where to allocate and how to modulate attention while reading a short story? To what extent are their attentional modulations influenced by textual characteristics and personal characteristics? This study uses response data from group discussions of the short story “Where are you going, where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates (1966). Participants read the story in advance, color-coding words or lines to indicate different modes of attention employed and annotated the text with text-related and unrelated mind-wandering thoughts. The results show how attentional allocation is driven by textual elements as well as readers’ choices, resulting in a complex interaction of elicited and volitional attention to certain elements of the text– not just focused or distracted attention, but a “modulated” and “integrated” experience that is dynamic and personal. These modulations are also impacted by contextual factors and the reader’s personal history that impact which aspects of a text are salient and how attention is directed. The results might provide an empirical basis for, but also challenge and supplement current theories of attentional modulation in reading literature.

“Art is seduction, not rape”

Susan Sontag (1965)

In recent years, a transformation in reading behaviors has been documented, which is often described in terms of a shift from close to hyperreading (Hayles 2007, 2012). In literary studies, close reading entails a close and in-depth examination of the language of (a segment of) a literary text including its tone and figures, its rhetorical strategies and techniques, and the ways in which the text produces meanings (Lentricchia and Dubois, 2003). More broadly, it is a strategy of sustained, focused attention to the text, its meaning and stylistic composition. Close reading is often contrasted with what has been called hyperreading: an umbrella term for non-linear ways of reading like skimming and scanning. Empirical studies in various areas of reading research have found that screens seem to encourage skimming, scanning, and hence a kind of ‘superficial’ reading (Liu, 2005; Mangen et al., 2013).

Close reading and hyperreading each have their specific modes of attention. Hayles (2007, 2012) writes about a shift in cognitive styles that manifests as a contrast between ‘deep attention’ and ‘hyper attention’. Deep attention is characterized by “concentrating on a single object for long periods ... [while] ignoring outside stimuli, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times” (2007: 187). Hyperattention, by contrast, is a cognitive style marked by rapid switching among tasks, with a preference for “multiple information streams”, seeking a “high level of stimulation” and with low tolerance for boredom (Ibid.). Close reading is almost exclusively discussed as pertaining to literary texts (but also stylistically dense theoretical texts and the exegesis of legal or religious texts), whereas skimming is usually related to information texts online. However, it would be wrong to assume that literary readers do not skim, or exclusively close read.

Often, studies on close reading and hyperreading conceptualize these terms, as well as attention and distraction, as a binary opposition. This becomes especially clear in the ways in which studies of task switching and multitasking are designed (e.g., Carrier et al., 2015; Waite et al., 2018). Such studies typically consist of one ‘main task’, for example reading a complex theoretical text, and a set of ‘distractions’ (e.g., incoming text messages). The question is whether in everyday situations of reading, attention and distraction are so easy to disentangle. The idea that our attentional focus is a ‘spotlight’ that we put on a certain object has facilitated thinking of attention in binary terms: illuminated versus unilluminated, on versus off, and concentration versus distraction (Veel, 2011). The borders between these two modes may be more porous: we continuously switch between them.

The research questions that I will pose in the present article are: How do individual readers determine where to allocate and how to modulate attention while reading a short story? To what extent are these attentional modulations influenced by textual characteristics, and what other factors play a role here? A qualitative-empirical method is used to gain insight into processes of attentional modulation in reading, which combines analysis of a short story with reader response data from two reading discussion sessions in groups. The story discussed by these reading groups, “Where are you going, where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates (1966), facilitated discussions around notions of deep and hyperattention, but also control and consent in case of absorptive reading experiences. Besides attentional processes and mind-wandering thoughts, environmental circumstances were considered, including external distractions, the reading body, and the spaces where reading takes place. Thus, I hope to obtain an inclusive picture of attentional modulations in an ecological setting, discussed in retrospect. The results might provide an empirical basis for, but also challenge and supplement current theories of attentional modulation in reading literature.

1. Theoretical background

1.1 Attentional modulation in reading

In education, close reading is often posed as the ideal method of reading literature (Lentricchia and Dubois, 2003). However, reading is rarely done in a cognitive mode of unbreakable, uninterrupted attention (Conners, 2009; Smallwood, 2011). To comprehend a text, we condense information, because of limitations in our working memory and attentional resources. This requires strategically allocating attention to text that seems significant, at the expense of text deemed less significant (Linderholm et al., 2018; Sanford and Emmott, 2012). Reading and discourse processing are comprised of selective dynamics that combine top-down and bottom-up processes of attention, which are partly guided by reader psychology and partly by how the text is written and the narrative is composed.

Narrative texts are designed to help us modulate our attention: their details are hierarchically organized in such a way that a reader knows on what elements to focus. Through the Rhetorical Focussing Principle (Sanford and Emmott, 2012) authors (not necessarily consciously) cause readers to pay particular attention to certain elements. Peter Rabinowitz (1987) has listed the ‘rules of notice’ by which this priming and hierarchical structuring occurs, with three general subclasses: rules of positioning (e.g., (sub)titles, beginnings and endings, epigraphs), intratextual disruption, and extratextual deviation. These affect, first, ‘noticeability’ (where to place our attention), and, second, ‘scaffolding’ (the notion that our interpretation of the text’s overall meaning should be able to account for those elements).

Textual manipulations to guide attentional selection are often described in terms of foregrounding and backgrounding techniques. Foregrounding denotes unusual or surprising linguistic forms or an unusually high or low density of forms, causing heightened or sharpened focus on those elements (Bálint et al., 2016; Hakemulder and Van Peer, 2015). These can occur on all linguistic levels—typographic, phonological, lexical/semantic, syntactic, and discursive (Leech and Short, 2007)—and disrupt the continuity of the text and narrative or go against extratextual norms.

On the other end of the attentional spectrum are devices for the downplaying information. The use of subordinate clauses, for instance, reduces the impact of information. Elements outside of the reader’s focus are suppressed or disadvantaged, hence less readily available for recollection: processing will be shallow. Whereas there is an established body of empirical studies into foregrounding (Hakemulder and Van Peer, 2015; Miall and Kuiken, 1994), strategic backgrounding, or de-emphasizing information, has received less attention. An example is a technique called ‘burying’, where the writer hides a piece of information in a subordinate clause. In detective fiction, this is often done for a clue to be introduced and barely decoded by the reader, so that it will only in retrospect be discovered as a clue (Sanford and Emmott, 2012: 92).

On the most basic level, attentional modulation is influenced by word frequency: rarer, less predictable words receive more attention; frequent, predictable words are likely to be skipped or fixated on for a shorter period (Faber et al. 2020). Repeated elements also receive attention. The relative import of (parts of) a sentence can further be signaled by devices of information structuring and prosodic stress, which control the focus of information ‘Clefting,’ for instance, sets part of the sentence apart; the ‘it-cleft’ (“It was a car she didn't know,” Oates, 1996) places the ‘clefted’ material in the scope of a narrow focus (Sanford and Emmott, 2012).

1.2 Mind-wandering

When reading, we frequently think about other things besides the text. Such attentional lapses are known as mind wandering, and most studies negatively correlate them with text comprehension (Metzinger, 2018; Smallwood, 2011; Smallwood and Schooler, 2015). Mind-wandering is described as a decoupling of attention from the task to internally generated thoughts (Smallwood, 2011). The eyes continue to scan the words on page or screen, yet the reader does not pay (enough) attention to their meaning.

Besides task-unrelated thought (TUT) (Christoff et al., 2016), mind-wandering can also involve ‘task-related inferences’ (Faber et al., 2018), like “how many pages are left”? or “I wonder where this story is going”. Two types are further distinguished: tuning and zoning out (Metzinger, 2018; Smallwood and Schooler, 2015). When readers tune out, they can become aware they are mind-wandering and might be able to control their train of thought at least to some extent. In cases of zoning out, readers are unaware they are mind-wandering. When readers engage in mind-wandering during literary reading, moreover, this is not just affected by predictability and word frequency effects, but also by the narrative’s plot development and style. Fabry and Kukkonen (2019) discuss the possibility of productive, ‘second-order’ mind-wandering: a ‘tuning out’ that might for instance occur when we read about a character who engages in daydreaming or mind-wandering.

1.3 Distributed reading

We see that the way in which readers modulate attention is partly prompted by textual characteristics. Of course, these theories have their limitations in capturing what actually happens when we read literature. After all, humans are no reading or decoding machines: individual differences play an important role in attentional processes. A productive frame for theorizing attentional modulations is ‘distributed reading’ (Trasmundi et al., 2021). Rather than theorizing reading as a sequence of internal decoding processes or a problem-solving task, this approach offers an inclusive picture of reading considering “textual genre, the contexts in which the words appear” and even “experiences and/or meanings that are not in the text” (5). The distributed perspective entails an embodied and multi-scalar description of reading practices of real readers. It attempts to bridge the gap between neuroscientific and embodied cognitive perspectives. Not only does such an integrated perspective draw on multiple sensory modalities, but it also considers how readers “enact cultural practices based on writing systems” (1). In these processes, reading re-evokes parts of the reader’s individual life experience. Embodiment thus interconnects multiple timescales for experience and the emergence of meaning, beyond the ‘here and now’ of reading, which urges us to think of the reading body in terms of lived experience. As attentional allocation and modulation during literary reading are multifaceted processes that are hard to study in isolation, since several dimensions play a role (including readerly and textual characteristics but also environment), this is an appropriate framework to bear in mind.

1.4 Hypotheses

In sum, we know that literary reading encompasses a selective dynamic of bottom-up and top-down processes of attention, which are partly guided by reader psychology and partly by textual composition. Narrative texts are designed help us modulate our attention, through a hierarchical organization of details and through foregrounding and backgrounding. A reader’s interpretation is then scaffolded on these salient details that draw her attention. Although many studies have focused on foregrounding, less work has been done on backgrounding and de-emphasizing information. The role of skimming in literary reading has also been underemphasized. In this article, I examine how individual readers determine where to allocate and how to modulate attention while reading a short story, to what extent their attentional modulations are influenced by textual characteristics, and what other factors are in play. Based on the literature reviewed, I hypothesize that during literary reading, readers modulate between close or deep attention, absorbed modes of reading, hyperattention and skimming, etc. Mind wandering (of the tuning-out variety, and especially in case of task and text-related thoughts) can play a productive role in interpretation. Personal memories and reading experiences play a pivotal role in the allocation of attention, as do environmental circumstances (spaces of reading, external distractions). In what follows, I analyze readers’ responses in a reading group setting to come to a naturalistic picture of how these factors and processes interrelate.

2. Approach

2.1 Method

This study was inspired by data-driven, ‘bottom up’ qualitative approaches, e.g. in-depth thematic analysis of interviews (Bálint et al., 2016) and studies that combine qualitative data with textual analysis (Bell et al., 2019) or verbal data from reading groups (Peplow et al., 2016). Unlike experimental studies, such approaches compensate their lack of control over the setting by ecological validity: they use texts in their original form, and have readers discuss them in a familiar environment like a book group or online discussion, with minimal intervention by the researcher (Bell et al. 2019). Naturalistic studies are well suited to generate data about larger, complex literary concepts instead of analyzing isolated devices or features.

Following common practice in qualitative research, I used a purposeful sampling method (Bálint et al., 2016) rather than population representativeness. Since there are not many existing studies on attentional modulation, I sought to explore its processes by soliciting responses from experienced readers who are used to giving voice to their reading experiences. Such a sampling procedure does not allow for generalization, but is appropriate for generating new, testable ideas (Bálint et al., 2016: 182).

Two discussion sessions took place in May 2021 through Zoom (N = 22). Participants were undergraduate and graduate students and (assistant) professors in an English (US, first session, 10 participants) and a Culture Studies department (Netherlands, second session, 12 participants). Students (graduate and undergraduate) were in the majority in both groups (6/10 and 7/12). Then there were assistant professors (2; 3) and full professors (2 in each group). Participants read the story in advance, instructed to find a quiet place and time to read the story in one sitting. They were asked to monitor their attention by color-coding words or lines where they

a. experienced a heightened, focused attention (red)

b. experienced a more shallow mode of attention, or felt the urge to skim (green)

c. skipped certain words or zoned out (blue)

Additionally, they could choose to annotate the text with thoughts occurring during reading. Annotations might include story-related (associations, aesthetic judgments, memories) as well as unrelated thoughts. A trigger warning was added, as the story might contain sensitive material. The color-coded story files and annotations served as concrete data and a loose guide for the discussion sessions. These were audio-recorded and transcribed; the transcriptions coded and analyzed by the researcher, resulting in the thematic labels used to structure the discussion section, which synthesizes and cites examples of all categories.

2.2 Reading material

“Where are you going, where have you been?” (1966; 6865 words) is narrated in the third person and mostly focalized through protagonist Connie: a fifteen-year-old who loves to escape her family home and hang out with her friends at the mall and diner. One night while with a date, her eyes meet those of a black-haired boy in a convertible jalopy painted gold, who grins and wags his finger at her: “Gonna get you, baby”. Later, while her family is away on a Sunday barbecue, Connie stays home to wash her hair, listen to music, and take a nap. A car comes up on the driveway; it is a stranger who calls himself Arnold Friend. Arnold asks Connie to come with him and his friend Ellie on a ride. Connie declines. Gradually, she realizes he is not a teenager, which he denies. Arnold knows her name, as well as her friends’ names: he can even give her a description of her family at the barbecue. She tells him to leave, but Arnold threatens to hurt her family upon return if she does not comply. Although he does not enter the house, Connie eventually comes out voluntarily. It is insinuated that he plans to take her somewhere to assault and murder her, although the ending is left open.

I chose this story because of its relative density of foregrounding and backgrounding devices. It is written in an accessible style and is full of significant details that potentially draw a reader’s attention. The narrative describes a gradual shift from a dreamy, relaxed (maybe even bored) state of being, to heightened vigilance (and even panic). It contains many ambiguities and defamiliarizing devices. I expect the story has the potential to evoke different associations and connotations for different readers. Though it was inspired by a true event, Oates herself has described her work as ‘psychological realism’ or ‘realistic allegory’ (Showalter 1994: 4), which leaves open a great array of possible interpretations.

3. Findings and discussion

In terms of foregrounding on word and sentence level, repetitions caught the readers’ attention, like the sentence “She’s dead” (8) (“it is repeated a couple of times so it must be important”) and the words “plain” and “steady” to describe the sister (“in such a short story making the second sentence in such a short time for two times, then something is happening”). Most mentioned were “A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them” (1966: 1) ¹ and “I’m going to get you, baby” (direct speech of the antagonist that foreshadows a threatening turn of events). Oates’ imagery was also mentioned as eliciting a sharpening of focus, e.g. [Arnold’s] nose long and hawklike, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up” (4).

The group discussions based on the color-coded story files and annotations were recorded, transcribed and thematically analyzed; leading to the following thematic labels: beginnings and endings, boundaries, dialogues, genre associations, embodied reading, punctum (‘red flags’), defamiliarization, forceful absorption, and mind wandering. Some of these correspond to general categories of positioning (like beginnings and endings) or types of discourse (like dialogues); others, like ‘forceful absorption’ relate to experiences particular to this specific text. All categories have been arrived at in a bottom-up fashion, by synthesizing from the discussion data. In addition, I discuss salient differences related to the factor of age in my findings.

3.1 Beginnings and endings

According to the ‘rules of position’, beginnings and endings of narrative texts tend to receive more attention (Rabinowitz, 1987). We tend to note and sometimes even remember the opening sentence of novels. In the case of Oates’ story, we expect most readers will pay close attention to the first and last sentence, the first sentence after and the last one before section breaks, and the first new line of ‘action’ after a descriptive passage. It is further hypothesized that the information given in sentences on such key positions (in this case a description of the heroine and a mysterious rendition of the landscape beyond the house and the fact that Connie knows she is “going to it,” 1966: 9) will be integrated in an overall interpretation of the story.

Indeed, during the reading group sessions, one discussant noted they applied more mental effort at the beginning to construct an image of the story-world and characters:

I guess on the first page I am still orienting, see what the scene is, the tone, where this thing is going, what is important. I am not really skimming or checking out, but read carefully, going back to the lines I can’t picture straight away. Sort of want to ‘get it right’.

Several other participants noted they had trouble paying attention in the beginning and that this changed once the dialogue started: “I was not really engaged in the story, I think for the first two pages or so until that front door scene started up”. Reasons varied: some were influenced by their genre expectations based on their reading histories: “I find myself sort of drifting off because I felt like it kind of read like a coming-of-age story. ... So I find myself staring out the window every now and then because I was like, OK, is this going to go anywhere?”; “the start seemed sort of ... almost bland, nothing happened”. We could see this as a lack of foregrounding on the diegetic level.

Others experienced this challenge of focusing on beginnings more habitually: “I often have that when I'm reading short stories that I know that there are many things in the beginning that are clues to stuff that happens later on and that I you know, I just don't have the concentration, I think, to focus that clearly on things”; “I find that I can never remember the beginning of anything”. Towards the middle, having spent more time with the characters, some started to identify with the characters, enabling focus:

I find that at the beginning, I have no idea what's going on. I don't know who I'm reading about. ... later on in the story, like X was just saying, you have a little more sympathy for her, ... kind of like when you hear a story about someone you know, it means a lot more to you than someone you don't know.

In medias res, the attention paid seemed to be of a different kind: less willful effort, more automatic: “[it’s] a little more like I've lost control. I need to know what's going to happen now. I need to keep reading. I'm a lot more attentive to the details”.

Towards the end, for some, the sense of being ‘captivated’ seemed to lessen again: “when she makes the decision to go out, that's when I also kind of notice that I got distracted. I started looking around”. One participant felt this had to do with an awareness of what we could call ‘discourse time’ instead of story time: the realization that not much ‘text’ is left on the pages: “Any time I come close to the end, I am thinking ‘how many pages are there left, when is it going to end?’ which usually distracts me from the story”. They wondered whether this explained the trouble they experienced remembering endings of stories.

3.2 Boundaries

Most of our readers noted a shift in attention towards a sharper focus when they read sentence “A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them” (Oates, 1966: 1): “around the same time where Eddie came in and the whole interaction in that parking lot occurred, that's where my attention really shifted”. This makes sense, as it is the first actual event in the story after the expositional set up. Most agreed that a sharpening of attention occurred when Arnold showed up at Connie’s house: “as the guy drives up in the car, then I'm all alert”. Such observations are in line with Faber, Radvansky and D’Mello’s (2018) study on event boundaries and narrative shifts in relation to attention: shifts in situation negatively predict attentional lapses. “[E]vent change directs attention to stimulus processing,” they explain this effect (Faber et al., 2018: 136). This automated, anticipatory process modulates attention, reducing the chances of mind-wandering. Indeed, the reading reports have several mentions of skimming or skipping ahead in anticipation of such a boundary change, e.g. in the beginning: “Scanning a bit because I want to get to the part where the story starts”; “Skipping ahead because I want to know how it ends”.

3.3 Dialogues

Most participants reflected on experiencing a heightened state of attentiveness when reading dialogue portions: “Then it suddenly went into this really sort of tense conversation between her and this person”; “all of the dialogue in the second part was red. ... I skipped over the descriptions”; “I was very much focused on furthering the dialogue rather than pausing and having that sort of reflective mode in-between”. One participant generalized this statement: “I absolutely focus at moments of dialogue ... I'm someone who will skip around when I see a block of prose to the next dialogical interaction”. For another, it was the other way around: “the moments that I had marked green or blue, where I felt the urge to skip or where I felt my mind wandering are usually moments of dialogue”.

3.4 Genre associations

Assumptions or expectations of genre steered participants’ attention and scaffolded interpretation. The first part of the story reminded several discussants of young-adult literature, of the “teenage coming-of-age” variety (with tropes like the “dreamy, endless summer”, a bookish vs a wild sister, hanging out at the diner). Recognition of these incited readers to skim and read superficially, from the assumption they knew how things were going to unfold:

I've read a lot of Y.A. [Young-Adult], I find I skim the more dreamy sections because I was like, oh, I've read this before. … it didn't really add to the story. And it was more like fluff to get you from A to B;

All of that is so almost gimmicky. ... and I love those books, I liked reading it, but it makes me not look into it as much, because usually, you're not supposed to focus on these tropes too much because they're sort of to set the scene, not to read carefully.

Here, genre expectations based on earlier reading experiences guide attentional processes, with skimming and superficial reading as a result.

Another participant was also steered in his attentional allocation by genre associations, but with the opposite effect of heightened vigilance: the first part of the story with its dreamy sequences was associated with a state of “calm before the storm” that you might “find in a detective novel”. It had “the effect of being primed for something bad to happen. You just know it's on the horizon”. Two participants noted their familiarity with Oates’ writings primed them to be vigilant from the start. They associated the author with ‘darker’ themes and were not misguided by the ‘generic’ or “seemingly banal or descriptive” beginning: “I know how carefully crafted things are”; “for me it was just freighted from the start with dread”.

One participant read the text as belonging to the vampire or werewolf genre, which clearly structured their reading: “so I was in the Twilight kind of reading mode. ... I was very disappointed when in the end no one was bitten in the neck”. Such predictions based on genre expectations are instances of predictive processing, which in literary reading consists of top-down inferences about what is going to happen based on earlier readings. This happens on the level of predictability, frequency, and word-recognition, but also plot development and style. New events in the plot (“no one was bitten in the neck”) can be conceptualized as prediction errors that invite readers to revise their predictions of what is likely to happen next (Kukkonen, 2014).

3.5 Embodied reading

Trasmundi et al. (2021) stress that reading is “radically embodied” (5) and entails much more than abstract cognitive operations like inferencing, interpretation, and analysis. It includes modalities such as gesture, haptics, and experiences of the text as a material substrate, which influence cognitive and emotional experience. In terms of the latter, it became clear that substrate also influences attentional allocation. One participant argued that reading the text in PDF format interfered with the immersion of the experience: “reading on the screen kind of made it difficult for me to really feel the words the way that I would as if it were on a page in a book”. In terms of embodiment, most participants expressed identifying with the protagonist to the point of feeling her anxiety in a bodily way. One described Connie’s ensuing panic attack as an “awakening” of the body:

I could totally identify when she can’t use the phone. Her hands go limp and sweaty. And she wants to call the police, but she’s unable. ... it seems a bit like it's an awakening for her, right ... yeah, she starts to feel things. And even if it’s a numbing but her body appears, sort of, and she starts to really get a sense of her own being alive and being threatened maybe. And her heart starts to beat faster, you get these physical details as well from that moment on.

This description of Connie’s beating heart caused heightened vigilance: “The image of her living beating heart makes me perceive her as being more alive than before”. It caused several readers to experience an awareness of their own beating hearts: “I got anxious. I felt Connie’s vulnerability”; “my heart was beating so fast by the end. It was quite a strange experience.”

3.6 Punctum (‘red flags’)

To facilitate discussion of attention to details, I introduced and briefly explained to the participants the concept ‘punctum’, that Roland Barthes coined with respect to photography, to denote a detail that stands out and captures your attention. Barthes describes the punctum as an “element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (1981: 26). Such details are personal and different for every viewer, and when applied to narrative texts, I expect they scaffold our interpretations. Oates’ story is packed with such potentially meaningful details that have triggered a wealth of interpretations. Our participants mentioned the descriptions of the house: “For me, it was the screen door, [which] is the one thing that stands between her and the creep for most of the story. But the screen door doesn't give you much protection, of course”; “the cardboard house and the shitty quality of the house is what stuck with me.”

Such details start to guide interpretations of the story, as was the case for the reader who interpreted it as a vampire story, and was surprised to find the others had not:

I had this whole image at this point of him being like half goat, like vampire. That's the image that stuck with me. And now that I hear you all talking I was like oh really, was that not there.

The same sort of ‘scaffolding,’ from detail to overall meaning, was based on the cardboard house: “I thought that would mean like it doesn’t really matter, it's inevitable. He’s just waiting there. He doesn’t even have to do anything. ... It’s like fate”.

Details about Arnold Friend’s appearance were often mentioned as punctum: his boots, make-up, hair that looks like a wig, grin, thick lashes, “slitted” eyes, and the car (“it is gold, it’s garish but also very dilapidated”). These details Connie notes about Arnold are a source of increasing tension. With her, the reader gets the sense something is very wrong: “Oates is describing how Connie’s attention is shifting and how suddenly, she starts to feel that something is off and that she is not comfortable in the situation. ... she notices the appearance of the man in a different way”. Noticing these ominous details in succession has an effect of a gradual, horrific realization.

A participant in the first session fittingly called these details ‘red flags’: “there are so many red flags planted at the beginning half of the story. But you really don't notice because it's really kind of a mundane half”; “she's been flirting with boys and has had these kinds of interaction,” another said, “so you don't think it's anything strange. ... He dresses like everyone else. So it’s hard to spot”. Strategically ‘planted’ in the first part of the story, these details do not draw attention initially but later turn out to be foreshadowing devices. Some revisited such details in light of what happens later: “then I had to go back to check out, you know, how she had.. what that guy had looked like the night before”. Such an evolving realization of the gravity of the situation puts the reader on a par with the protagonist, who spends the first part of the story daydreaming to then realize she ended up in a nightmare: “It's like we are on her exact same pace in figuring out ... the details and how ‘off’ they are, but not that much ‘off’ that you would be immediately alarmed”.

Beautiful phrases (e.g., “breathless with daring,” 1) were marked as drawing attention, yet such ‘attention-grabbing’ details were also described as distracting: “I began to be distracted (or drawn in, not sure?) by Oates’ creative metaphors and similes”; “I was distracted by focusing on the eyes like chips of broken glass …”; “I couldn't help being amazed at some of the metaphors, ... I sort of got away from the story, which is funny, because she puts those in to intensify the story”. This illustrates the fact that modes of attention and distraction are indeed complexly interwoven, integrated in dynamic ways in reading processes: what draws our attention entails a distraction from other elements. For any portion of text to be focused on, other bits must be less attended to. Of course, this is also informed by the linear unfolding of the story and temporal sequencing, as those elements necessarily come before and after. Still, we see that it depends on both a reader’s attention to particular details and overall immersion in the narrative, whether these elements become foreground or background: a response to foregrounding on a stylistic level detracts from immersion in the story-world. This is important to keep in mind to nuance the ‘Rhetorical Focusing Principle’ (Sanford and Emmott, 2012), which holds that such hierarchies are established foremost by authorial design.

3.7 Defamiliarization

Such a surprising word, metaphor, or sentence that draws attention to itself ‘defamiliarizes’ the things that are described, can cause prolonged reading time and increased depth of processing (Bálint et al., 2016; Miall and Kuiken, 1994). Absorption, although it can co-occur with foregrounding, works differently: attention is oriented at the world of the story, and as a result, the reader might lose awareness of their own context, time and place, as well as themselves (Kuijpers et al., 2014). Absorption thus engages with a different mode of attention than reading for aesthetics: the latter might demand more effortful persistence, whereas the former might be more ‘automatic’.

Many instances of defamiliarization in Oates’ story were brought up, often referring to Arnold’s appearance. One participant describes being confronted with

images I didn’t really understand, that he stood in a certain position or he had a kind of facial expression. ... I think at one time, he hugs her uncomfortably with his wrist limp and his elbows together or something. I was just looking at that. I didn’t know what that meant. If that’s a sign of something, I try to picture how that looked and couldn’t..... It sort of took me out of it.

Several discussants remarked that the detail of the ill-fitted boots, that Friend seems to have stuffed to seem taller, was incongruent with his power over Connie: “it seemed a bit weird because he seems very in control. ... How is he standing? Because in my brain, that would mean that he is going to fall over”; “I probably wouldn't feel as uncomfortable if someone's trying to intimidate me if they are seemingly uncomfortable, that's not going to have as powerful as an effect”.

Such situations were hard to ‘picture’ (“how is he standing”?), map out situationally (“can he see into a garden that her family is in?”) or intellectually (“how does he have so much information of what they're doing right this minute?”) and deviations from real-life expectations (intimidating, yet unstable in his boots). They complicate the construction of a clearly defined situational model (Fabry and Kukkonen, 2019). Some of our participants had actively tried to disambiguate them, expending additional and prolonged cognitive effort for comprehension. This resulted in a more intense engagement, slowing down, going back to earlier details (based on a feeling that the ‘key’ to disambiguation was hidden in the text), and focused attention.

A related point of tension that stems from incongruity with real-life expectations (foregrounding through extratextual deviation), was Connie’s lack of resistance, which for some readers obstructed identification: “why is she not doing anything? That was constantly on my mind. There’s so many things that you could do”; “the pivotal moment for me is that she’s going to get to the phone and then she is not doing it. She’s sort of panicking, but the phone is still working ... For me, that is a very unconvincing situation”.

When such indeterminacies on the lexical level move to higher levels of meaning-making (or heighten meta-cognitive involvement), they typically incite ‘tuning out’, the mode of mind-wandering with awareness, rather than ‘zoning out’ (Fabry and Kukkonen, 2019). Refamiliarizing strategies included inferences of Connie’s psychological state (“at some point, I think her mind, like this rational part kind of shuts down and she just follows”) as well as genre classifications (“Well, for me, he was a vampire so he was definitely mesmerizing, and she couldn't move so it made sense”).

3.8 Forceful absorption

As readers started to realize this is not a typical dreamy ‘coming of age’ story and that the protagonist finds herself in a life-threatening situation, a particular subtype of immersive experience arises that Bálint et al. (2016) label ‘forceful absorption’. Textual deviations cause an absorption that is intense (or even ‘irresistible’), accompanied by a seeming lack of agency as well as attempts to regulate or downplay the intensity of the experience.

Such an experience was reported by a majority of the participants. In some cases, it was linked to plot points, such as “when she makes the decision to go out.” These events were typically deviations from real-life expectations (“Why isn’t she doing something?”). More often, forceful absorption was clearly tied to certain descriptions that came back in several reports, most of them concerned with the protagonist’s bodily experiences: sentences describing Connie’s beating heart and including salient bodily details like her hands going limp were repeatedly mentioned (“the telephone was clammy and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it”; “she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness”).

Most of the participants in our study indicated feeling overwhelmed or captivated at some point: “I feel like I have a lack of control, you don’t really want to engage with it but you kind of have to. And so I feel that there’s almost a lack of readerly consent here”; “I didn’t have much agency over what was happening, it felt ... like the bystander effect: I don't really want to see whether it was going to escalate, but also I want to know what happens”; “I don’t want to go through with this, but of course I do. It's like watching an accident happen”. Such descriptions contrast with the acts of willful, effortful attention reported upon reading the beginning of the story. Here, attention is almost inevitable: automatic but reluctant.

Closely related to forceful absorption are experiences of “forceful character engagement”: an identification with characters to such a high degree that it is experienced as “too intense” (Bálint et al., 2016). In the present case, this feeling of conflict did not arise from “unpleasantness” of identifying with a morally dubious character (as in the examples that the authors describe) but simply because the situation portrayed is too tense and horrific, as several readers expressed in relation to Oates’ descriptions of Connie’s panic attack:

I was ... drawn into the text when it showed experiences of her trauma or fear, hitting her like this .... this really uncanny feeling that something really, really bad is happening and .... I can’t even move anymore or don’t do anything about it.

Two participants connected Connie’s situation of being ‘captivated’ to the reader’s absorption in the narrative: “I think captivation is a really important term in relation to the story as not only the thematics but the metacommentary on absorptiveness and what we want from a narrative”. In both sessions, this led to a discussion of control and consent, tied to absorptive reading experiences: can we differentiate between focused attention as an act of will, and absorption as being spell-bound, captivated? When does one topple over into the other?

this question of being captivated, ... that's sort of a value, an aesthetic value, that actually put in this context is horrifying. ... I think there is a kind of reflection on this whole question of ... readerly consent.

Strategies to counter forceful absorption included skimming the passages that were too intense, or skipping ahead: “how long is this going to ... where is the end, it is not about ‘I'm tired of reading it’. It's just like, how bad is this going to get, you know, and calculating your how much more emotional energy you need”. One reader described this deliberate tuning out, or reading with less attention, as “a defense mechanism ... as it was a bit too much for me at some point. .. I just thought that maybe it's better to switch my attention to something else than to actually get exposed to this horror”. Another expressed: “I was skimming to see what the story was and to be done with it.”

A third decided to read the second half of the story as a dream, calling it their “coping strategy”: “I'm trying to gain control.. ... I was beginning to feel overwhelmed with the stress of what was going to happen. And then into my mind came the idea that maybe she's dreaming this, that this is a nightmare”. In sum, when absorption becomes too forceful, defense strategies include switching modes of attention, from close to superficial, or revising one’s interpretation.

3.9 Mind-wandering

Annotations our participants provided were split into Task-Related Inferences and Task-Unrelated Thoughts. The first category was subdivided into text level, story level, intertextual associations, biographical associations, and metareflection. The second was divided into internal and external interruptions, text-induced tuning out, text-induced zoning out, and body-related thoughts. See Appendix A for a sample of annotations (similar ones were eliminated for clarity).

During our discussions, it became clear that some experienced mind-wandering as a ‘decoupling’ from the task, thus confirming the literature (Smallwood, 2011; Smallwood and Schooler, 2015). This, however, did not preclude thinking about the text itself: “this sure happens to me a lot, that I'm thinking about what I've just read but at the same time, I'm also reading on, and then I realized that I haven't been paying attention to what I have just been reading”; “the parts where my mind starts to wander are usually when there’s four lines of just prose. My eyes can skim the remaining words in that short paragraph, so I know what's coming. So I let my mind wander a little bit”. Here the textual substrate impacts where the mind starts to wander.

Narrative and stylistic aspects influence the timing and duration of mind-wandering episodes as well. The reader’s internal thoughts then align with the textual content, heighten comprehension and reflection, and facilitate immersion. When characters in literary texts are mind-wandering themselves (first-order mind-wandering), Fabry and Kukkonen (2019) suggest, this might elicit ‘second-order’ mind-wandering episodes in the reader. In response, the reader might construct “task-relevant and attention-driven virtual scenarios” in her mind (1). Rather than merely distracting from the task and obstructing interpretation, such modes of tuning out might be productive and lead to increased comprehension. Such relevant acts of mind-wandering can be triggered through figurative language: for instance, at the description of Connie’s house as a cardboard box, at which a reader described her thoughts as follows: “Here I felt a break with reality, and the idea of a dream returned. But a nightmare.”

When we look at the contents of Oates’ story in this context, we notice that in the first half, Connie is not really ‘present’. She is daydreaming and fantasizing about boys and her next opportunity to escape from her family home and household chores:

Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the back yard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still. (2)

When asked about the effect of such dreamy passages on their reading, some respondents reported experiencing a shift in attention. In the annotations, one reader admitted that upon reading such a passage, they “zoned out a bit because I didn’t know where the story was going. Quickly checked my e-mail.”

The colors given to these passages indicate different modes of attention. It might be expected that readers would have colored them either green (for: “I experienced a more shallow mode of attention, or felt the urge to skim”) or blue (“skipped certain words or zoned out”). Yet, they were colored red (“experienced a heightened, focused attention”) even more often. This could be related to the trigger warning, which informed readers that the dreamy atmosphere was just the “calm before the storm”, as one participant put it, leading to heightened vigilance. It could also be because mind-wandering does not always have to inform a more superficial reading, and can be an intense and meaningful experience:

when I’m really interested in a text, my mind wanders a lot. .... I would have thought, if your mind wanders, you’re not really with the text and paying attention, but actually ... I had many interesting thoughts like, oh, wow, this is a beautiful sentence or something like that, it's like actually being really into the text.

This offers some support for claims that mind-wandering (in a task-related way) can be a sign of investment.

3.10 Age differences

There were no clear, general differences between the participants from the Dutch and those from the American institution. There were, however, discernible differences between the younger ([under]graduate and assistant professor) and the older, more advanced readers (professor level). Younger readers more often reported experiences of identifying with the protagonist: “I was constantly thinking, OK, well, how would I how would I act, how would I react to something like this happening?”; “I didn’t ... connect with a lot of things about her. Like my relationship with my sister is fantastic compared to hers.” This tendency might have to do with the choice of a story with a protagonist that is closer in age to these participants. Older readers were more focused on the language and style of the story, as well as narrative structure and focalization, and they also approached the writing in a more evaluative manner: “Oates is so brilliant in the details of describing the character.” This might be at least partly due to their education during a time when close reading was more dominant in literary education (as one professor suggested).

Another difference concerned contextualization: some of the younger participants reported on having looked up information online after reading the story (for instance on Wikipedia), while the older readers refrained from doing so, in one case consciously: ““I deliberately didn’t go to any outside source to see what others had said the story meant. I still haven’t.” This could tie in with the emphasis on close reading, as an approach to ‘the text itself’. Younger participants also tended to make more comparisons to TV shows and young-adult literature. In sum, they expressed a need to contextualize the story, checking what year it came out and situating it within a genre.

Last, most of the younger respondents in both sessions reported to have trouble focusing on the beginning of the story (in some cases because of aforementioned genre expectations, i.e., vampire or young-adult literature), whereas the older ones reported on a vigilant reading attitude from the outset (in some cases because of familiarity with the author).

4. Conclusion

I set out from the notion that attention and distraction are more integrated than is often assumed in reading research, for instance in the case of reading studies where distractions are seen as external impingements contrasted with the reading procedure. The present study therefore employed a more naturalistic setting, namely that of the reading discussion group. Rather than seeing attention and distraction as polar opposites, in this article I aimed to show that there are rhythms to attention and focus, and that these rhythms are influenced by aspects of the texts that give salience to certain features and direct attention and absorption in certain ways, the choices readers make about where to focus their attention, as well as contextual factors like personal reading history or environmental factors that further channel readerly attention. These modes of reading and their associated forms of attention are more entangled in literary reading than current research might suggest. A challenge for empirical literary studies in the present media landscape is to more precisely determine when readers read with close attention and when they skim, or what they skip, and for what reasons. To this end, the present study has laid some groundwork for further empirical investigations.

My findings indeed corroborated some of the existing (empirical) research reviewed, on mind-wandering and event-boundaries (Faber et al., 2018), defamiliarization (Bálint et al., 2016), and productive mind-wandering (Fabry and Kukkonen, 2019). I found that genre expectations and earlier reading experiences indeed scaffolded interpretation and guided attentional allocation. We saw that attention-grabbing elements are distractors, and vice versa: these roles are not fixed in a hierarchical organization, but dynamic and different for each reader.

What my findings add to the existing literature is that there is a relation of skimming and skipping behavior to intense modes of absorption, described as a ‘coping’ strategy. Skimming is often associated with superficial reading and hyperattention; it would be expected that readers skim when under-stimulated by the reading material. Our discussions, however, show that skimming also becomes a strategy when the text is overly stimulating, when the tension is too much, or character identification is experienced as overly forceful. In such cases, a superficial reading or even skipping ahead is used as a ‘defense mechanism’ to lessen absorption. When absorption and identification became overly forceful, some reader also adapted their strategies of interpretation accordingly, choosing (not entirely voluntarily) to read the story as a dream or nightmare. This could be a an addition to the literature on forceful absorption that is worthwhile to explore in further empirical research. The study by Bálint et al. (2016) does not devote much attention to the reading strategies that follow from the types of absorption they distinguish, or the characteristics (age, gender, etc.) of readers who experience those modes. Another finding that warrants empirical investigation, is the difference in readiness to close-read between more advanced (in age and career) readers versus younger, student-aged readers. We saw that the former group devoted more attention to stylistics, whereas the latter were more inclined to identify with the protagonist (who in this case was closer to them in age) and expressed the need to look for contextual information, and to skim until the ‘action’ started.

Drawing on personal experience and socio-cultural norms for sense-making and symbolization, distributed reading is a helpful frame for such inclusive reading experiences (Trasmundi et al., 2021). It includes attention to the embodied nature of reading and the substrate of the text as well as environmental factors. Trasmundi et al. (2021) express the need for empirical investigations of how readers draw on personal experience, socio-cultural skills, and general life experience. In addition to experimental reading research on how the brain processes language, they argue, we need studies that take contextual factors into account. The present, explorative and qualitative study, can be seen as a modest answer to this call. Future studies of this type might ask participants in a pre-questionnaire about the external frames they might be bringing to the text (e.g., familiarity with other works by the other or the movie based on the text, or the type of story) as well as the reading setting and environment, before they start their reading. Another line of inquiry could be how contextual and paratextual information frames attention modulations in reading, for instance, by presenting the story as part of an anthology of different genres like coming-of-age stories or vampire stories. The effects of (a lack of) trigger warnings could be tested as well. Furthermore, it would be interesting to measure recall of the passages the readers indicate to have focused on, a couple of days after the reading. ²

Last, based on this study, I recommend a clear conceptual distinction between modes of attention pertaining to absorption on the one hand, and effortful persistence on the other (one respondent called this the difference between “what grabs your attention and what you pay attention to”). These results challenge and supplement current theories of attentional modulation in reading literature. In the Absorption-like State Questionnaire (ASQ), for instance, attention is constructed in an overly narrow sense as “a sustained form of concentration on the world of the story, as a consequence of which the reader loses awareness of the world surrounding them, the flow of time, and themselves” (Kuijpers et al., 2014: 91), with items like “The story gripped me in such a way that I could close myself off for things that were happening around me”. Such a construct does not allow for a more fine-grained differentiation between different modes of attention such as more effortful concentration. It presents attention as a unified phenomenon, which will affect what is and is not measured.

4.1 Limitations

This method of studying attention in reading is subjective and the findings are difficult to generalize: different groups of participants would yield different results. The groups were diverse in terms of age and cultural background, yet all participants were students or professors in a literature-related program. To complement this approach, it would be fruitful to conduct an eye-tracking study with the same story, comparing avid literary readers with non-readers of different and across different age groups, which is expected to offer more systematizable results. At the same time, the present study points to the limitations of such behavioral measures, as most of the findings here indicate personal preferences, associations, and interpretations which would not come to the fore. This indicates the necessity of both quantitative and qualitative methods when researching attention in reading.

A known limitation of naturalistic approaches is that there are many variables at play, meaning the researcher has less control compared to an experimental setting. An added benefit of a collective discussion session over a quantitative approach is that readers are exposed to alternative interpretations and comment on what they have not or barely noticed in a text, and interpretations they did not arrive at. This will bring individual differences into view. Reading the material at home before the session exposes one to possible forgetfulness regarding aspects of the experience. Conversely, one discussant remarked, collective discussion brings back details of the experience that would otherwise be forgotten or overlooked:

it’s interesting how much more meaning I get out of the story after discussing it with you all and how much attention that I didn’t even know I paid when I was reading it, ... I remember things that ... didn’t necessarily stick with me when I was reading.

This makes the reading group setting a rich environment for the study of attention in a broader perspective.

A trigger warning was added to the assignment, which in some cases affected the reading procedure, making participants more alert. Future research might make this explicit, for instance by studying the effect of trigger warnings on attentional processes while reading. As I had anticipated, monitoring one’s attention while reading turned out to be distracting from the reading. Reading from a screen, adding comments, and color-coding are interrupted procedures: “I found myself unable to stop thinking about how much thinking about attention ... changed the reading experience ... It made me a very, very self-conscious reader”. This, however, did not impede data collection, as data were mostly derived from the transcriptions of the sessions for which the annotations and color-coding served as preparation.