Inferential reasoning in episodic memory

Moeser, Shannon Dawn

doi:10.1016/0022-5371(76)90019-0

Cited by 70 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…That is, these data were elicited from conditions in which the to-be-comprehended stimuli were semantically unrelated and void of thematic integrity (or at least it appeared that way to subjects). It is difficult to draw conclusions about a presumed outcome of the comprehension process from situations where comprehension (in its usual sense) cannot even occur (for comparable arguments see Moeser, 1976, andPerfetti &Goldman, 1974). A more valid test of this hypothesis would involve creating two experimental conditions; in both, comprehension could occur but integration would be less likely in one than the other.…”

Section: The Integration Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface information loss in comprehension

Gernsbacher

1985

Cognitive Psychology

201

185

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Shortly after a sentence has been comprehended, information about its exact surface form (e.g., its word order) becomes less available. The present research demonstrated this phenomenon during the comprehension of nonverbal stimuli (picture stories). In Experiment 1, significantly more surface (left/right orientation) information was lost after comprehending several picture stories than just one; in Experiment 2, more was lost after comprehending an entire picture story than half of one. In Experiment 3, subjects segmented the picture stories into their constituents; in Experiment 4, significantly more surface information was lost after crossing these constituents' boundaries than before. The present research also investigated why surface information is lost. Four explanations were considered: Surface information loss is the result of performing grammatical transformations (the linguistic hypothesis), exceeding short-term memory limitations (the memory limitations hypothesis), integrating information into gist (the integration hypothesis), shifting from building one substructure to initiating another (the processing shift hypothesis). The linguistic and memory limitations hypotheses were considered inadequate; the integration and the processing shift hypotheses were tested in the last set of experiments. In Experiment 5 (using nonverbal stimuli), the predictions made by the processing shift hypothesis were confirmed; in Experiment 6 (using verbal stimuli), these results were replicated. Other implications of the processing shift hypothesis concerning surface information loss are discussed.A well-known phenomenon involved in language comprehension is this: Shortly after a passage is comprehended, information about the exact surface form of its sentences (e.g., their word order) becomes less available. By far the most cited demonstration of this phenomenon is Sachs ' (1967). Her subjects listened to a narrative story that included a sentence such as 1. He sent a letter about it to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.After comprehending this sentence, subjects decided whether it or Sentence 2 was the sentence they just heard. 2A letter about it was sent to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.If subjects were tested immediately after hearing the target sentence, their ability to discriminate between it and its reversed form was around 90%. However, if they were tested after comprehending only 80 additional syllables, performance fell to just above chance.Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. M. A. Gernsbacher,

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Section: The Integration Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface information loss in comprehension

Gernsbacher

1985

Cognitive Psychology

201

185

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“…Differential recognition would imply that a story has been processed with respect to a story structure schema and that a macrostructure (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) (Bransford & Franks, 1971;Moeser, 1976Moeser, , 1977 and can be used to aid in the verification (Reder, 1979) or recall (Masson, 1979) Intuitions about the relative degree of importance of the selected statements were evaluated by having a separate group of subjects from the introductory psjchology subject pool provide importance ratings. Twenty-seven subjects read each critical narrative and then evaluated each statement in its corresponding set of selected statements for importance to the general meaning of the story.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive processes in skimming stories.

Masson

1982

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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for their guidance and contributions to this work. I am grateful to James Miller for his help in conducting the simulations reported in Experiment 4, and to Linda Sala for many important discussions about skimming and reading in general. I also thank Henry Roediger, Douglas Vipond, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful editorial suggestions.Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Masson,

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“…Yet, when the same materials were used in the memory task, the subjects made false recognition responses to both logical implications and pragmatic implications. Two additional studies that have dealt with inferences in memory tasks are Kintsch (1974) and Moeser (1976). In both of these studies, it appears that the phenomena being studied are aspects of text cohesiveness (cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory for the pragmatic implications of sentences

Brewer

1977

Memory & Cognition

134

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A sentence pragmatically implies another sentence when information in the first sentence leads the hearer to expect something that is neither explicitly stated nor necessarily implied by the original sentence. Thus, The safe-cracker pur the match to the fuse pragmatically implies The safe-cracker lit the fuse. In a cued recall task with sentences containing pragmatic implications, 19% of the items were recalled correctly while 26% of the responses consisted of the pragmatic implications of the original sentences. The data were interpreted as demonstrating the strong interaction of the subjects' long-term knowledge with the episodic memory for sentences task.The purpose of the present paper is threefold: (l) to propose a classification of the heterogeneous types of "inferences" used in recent memory experiments, (2) to show the effects in recall of one of these classes-the class of pragmatic implications, and (3) to discuss the theoretical implications of the findings.Recent experiments on inferences in the comprehension and memory of linguistic material have used a great variety of types of inferences. Typical examples are: There is a tree with a box beside it, and a chair is on top of the box. The box is to the right of the tree implies The chair is to the right of the tree

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Inferential reasoning in episodic memory

Cited by 70 publications

References 13 publications

Surface information loss in comprehension

Surface information loss in comprehension

Cognitive processes in skimming stories.

Memory for the pragmatic implications of sentences

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