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College undergraduates read stories from one of two directed perspectives or no directed perspective. An idea's significance in terms of a given perspective determined whether the idea would be learned and, independently, whether it could be recalled a week later. These results were interpreted to mean that alternative high-level schemata can provide frameworks for assimilating a text, perhaps by providing "slots" for different types of information. Later the schema from which an instantiated memorial representation of a passage was constructed may furnish the retrieval plan for recovery of detailed information.Taking Different Perspectives on a Story 2 Taking Different Perspectives on a Story People are more likely to learn and remember the important than the unimportant elements of a prose passage. That this is so was known by the turn of the century (Binet & Henri, 1894; Thieman & Brewer, in press) and there have been increasingly rigorous demonstrations since that time (Newman, 1939;Gomulicki, 1956;Johnson, 1970;Meyer & McConkie, 1973; Bower, in press). An exciting development of the last few years has been the explication of the notion of importance in terms of theories of text structure. Our concern is that in their less cautious moments theorists have permitted the inference that the structural importance of an element in a passage is an invariant that follows from the logic of a propositional analysis (Kintsch, 1974, p. 137) or a text grammar (Meyer, 1975, p. 184; Frederikson, 1975,pp. 160-162). This is an inference that ought to be resisted.More significant than the structure in some sense contained in a text, is the structure the reader imposes on the text. These structures will be called schemata following Piaget (1936), Bartlett (1932), and others (Kant, 1781;Anderson, 1976;Rumelhart & Ortony, 1976). Later in the paper schema theory will be discussed in more detail. For the moment, it is enough to say that imposing a schema on a text simply means viewing the text from a certain perspective.A text will be incomprehensible if a reader is unable to discover a schema that subsumes it. Bransford and Johnson (1973) The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many.In the short run this may not seem important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places.Eventually they will...

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In two experiments, subjects were instructed to take a distinctive point of view while reading and recalling a story. Perspectives assigned before reading, shortly after reading, and long after reading all had substantial effects on recall. The results were interpreted to mean that the schema brought into play by the perspective instructions selectively enhances encoding when operative during reading and selectively enhances retrieval when operative during attempts at recall. The schema operative during reading appears to influence not only the likelihood that certain text elements will be learned but also their longevity in memory.

The present study investigated why it is that the more concrete the subject noun phrase of a sentence, the more likely the predicate is to be recalled when the subject noun phrase is the cue. The findings were that concreteness dramatically influences both the probability of recognition of the subject noun phrase and the probability of recall of the predicate, given recognition. These results were taken to mean that a concrete phrase makes a good conceptual peg because it is likely to be given a specific, stable encoding and because it tends to redintegrate the whole sentence. Regression analysis showed that the concreteness effect could not be attributed to an influence on comprehensibility. A model of sentence memory is offered which can account for the results.