Glossary

Anti-Spoiler Protocol

Also known as: Spoiler protection

The system Fabulè uses to build the AI's narrative context from the reader's position, including only the text already read and excluding later parts of the book.

Contextual recap

Also known as: Contextual summary

A summary built around the reading point reached that recalls only what the reader should already know.

Maps, genealogies, and timelines

Representations that help readers navigate the places, family ties, characters, and events of a complex story.

Narrative Re-entry

Also known as: Narrative re-entry point

The expression Fabulè uses for returning to a story after a break: recovering the context needed to understand the scene, without rereading and without spoilers.

Natural dialogue

The ability to ask open questions about a book and receive answers phrased clearly and consistently with the context.

Reading memory

The feature that preserves reading context and helps recall characters, relationships, and previously encountered events.

Reading position

The exact place the reader has reached in a book, used to calibrate answers and recaps.

Character relationships

The family, emotional, social, or conflicting ties that connect characters.

Narrative arc

The path through which a story, conflict, or character develops over the course of a book.

Narrative event

A unit of the story perceived as coherent in terms of characters, place, time and goals; it does not necessarily coincide with a page or a chapter.

Narrative tension

The emotional pressure created by conflicts, dangers, or questions that remain unanswered.

Plot

The events and cause-and-effect relationships that build a story.

Subplot

A secondary story that develops alongside the main plot.

Suspense

The feeling of anticipation and uncertainty that makes readers want to discover what happens next.

Timeline

Also known as: Narrative timeline

The chronological order of events, which may differ from the order in which they are told.

Worldbuilding

The construction of a story world, including its places, cultures, rules, history, peoples, and systems.

Character identification

The process through which readers understand or emotionally experience a character's point of view.

Cognitive attention

The mental focus needed to follow events, characters, goals, and consequences.

Cognitive map

Also known as: Narrative map

The mental representation readers build to connect characters, places, events, and relationships.

Emotional engagement

The emotional bond readers develop with characters and with what happens in the story.

Event boundary

Also known as: Narrative boundary

The point where one narrative situation ends and another begins: characters, place, time or goals change, and the reader's mental model of the story is updated.

Event segmentation

Also known as: Event Segmentation Theory

The process by which we organize a continuous experience, such as reading a story, into distinct meaningful units called events.

Event-Indexing Model

Also known as: Event indexing

The model describing five dimensions along which the events of a story are linked in memory: protagonists, time, space, causality and intentionality.

Fragmented reading

Reading spread across short sessions or long breaks, which can make the context harder to remember.

Narrative immersion

The feeling of being deeply absorbed in a story and temporarily less aware of one's surroundings.

Narrative transportation

The state in which attention, emotion, and imagination converge on a story, making readers feel inside its world.

Prediction error

The gap between what the reader expects and what actually happens: when it grows, the mental model of the story is updated and a new event is perceived.

Reading Slump

Also known as: Reader block

The difficulty of resuming or continuing a book, often tied to losing the narrative context rather than to a lack of interest.

Remindings

Also known as: Autobiographical resonances

Personal memories and experiences evoked by a story that can strengthen engagement.

Retrospective involvement

Continuing to think about a story and its characters after closing the book.

Situation model

Also known as: Situational representation

The mental representation of the situation described by the text, who is in the scene, where, when and why, which lets the reader understand a passage beyond the individual words.

Visual imagery

The mental images of places, faces, and atmospheres that form while reading.