It is well known that people who read fiction have many reasons for doing so. But perhaps one of the most understudied reasons people have for reading fiction is their belief that reading will result in their acquisition of certain forms of knowledge or skill. Such expectations have long been fostered by literary theorists, critics, authors, and readers who have asserted that reading may indeed be among the best ways to learn particular forms of knowledge. Modern psychological research has borne out many of these claims. For example, readers of fiction learn cognitive skills such as mentalizing or theory of mind. Reading fiction is also associated with greater empathic skills, especially among avid or lifelong readers. For readers who are emotionally transported into the fictional world they are reading about, powerful emotional truths are often discovered that may subsequently help readers build, or change, their identities. Fiction readers acquire factual information about places or people they may not have any other access to. But reading fiction also presents opportunities to acquire inaccurate factual information that may diminish access to previously learned accurate information. If readers are provided with inaccurate information that is encoded, they have opportunities to make faulty inferences, whose invalidity the reader is often incapable of detecting. Readers of fiction use schematic world knowledge to navigate fictional texts. But if the border between fiction and reality becomes blurred, as might be the case of avid readers of fiction, there is a risk that they may export schematic knowledge from the world of fiction to the everyday world, where it may not be applicable. These and other findings suggest that the varieties of learning from fiction form a complex, nuanced pattern deserving of greater attention by researchers.

众所周知，读小说的人这样做的原因很多。但是，人们对于阅读小说最缺乏了解的原因之一可能是他们相信阅读会导致他们获得某种形式的知识或技能。长期以来，文学理论家，评论家，作家和读者一直对这种期望寄予厚望，他们认为阅读确实是学习特定形式知识的最佳途径之一。现代心理学研究证实了其中许多主张。例如，小说的读者学习认知技能，例如心理思维或心理理论。阅读小说还与更高的移情能力相关，尤其是在狂热或终生读者中。对于那些被情感带入小说世界的读者而言，人们经常发现强大的情感真相，这些事实随后可以帮助读者建立或改变自己的身份。小说读者会获得有关他们可能没有其他访问权限的地点或人物的事实信息。但是，阅读小说也为获取不正确的事实信息提供了机会，这可能会减少对先前学习的准确信息的访问。如果为阅读器提供了不正确的编码信息，则他们有机会做出错误的推论，而该推论者通常无法检测其无效性。小说的读者使用示意图的世界知识来浏览小说文本。但是，如果小说和现实之间的界限变得模糊（就像狂热的小说读者那样），他们就有可能将虚构的知识从虚构的世界转移到日常生活中，在可能不适用的地方。这些发现和其他发现表明，从小说中学习的多样性形成了一种复杂的，细微差别的模式，值得研究者更多的关注。