When such devices succeed in eliciting mental imagery, they can become a source of pleasure to readers as well as an aid to immersion, memory for text, or even deeper insight. Invocations of what it is like to experience the world through our senses have always been an important part of the creative writer toolkit. Whatever genre of fiction we happen to favour, one of the things that make us prefer a given author over another is their way of expressing everyday sensory experience.

We propose that enactive style involves more imagery processes which can be reflected in eye movement behavior. Results show that readers experienced more difficulties conjuring up mental images during reading descriptive style texts and that longer fixation duration on words were associated with enactive style text. After reading, participants completed questionnaires assessing aspects of the reading experience generally, as well as their text-elicited mental imagery specifically. In a second study, participants read two texts (one theoretically cueing descriptive imagery, the other cueing enactment imagery) while their eye movements were recorded.

The quantitative analyses of word category distributions of two dominantly enactive and two dominantly descriptive texts indicated significant differences especially in the number of verbs, with more verbs in enactment compared to descriptive texts. “Enactive” style texts render characters interacting with their environment, and “descriptive” style texts render environments dissociated from human action. Specifically, we focused on the two main categories in Kuzmičová’s typology, i.e., texts dominated by an “enactive” style, and texts dominated by a “descriptive” style. Based on Kuzmičová’s phenomenological typology of narrative styles, we studied the specific contributions of mental imagery to literary reading experience and to reading behavior by combining questionnaires with eye-tracking methodology.

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