A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high‐dimensional “situation‐state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart's [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation.A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation‐state space. During the (...) inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing.An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion. (shrink)

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious (...) or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world. (shrink)

Stories, in pictorial format, orally narrated, and later on as narrative texts, have played a key role in human evolution and to this day continue to surreptitiously teach us things and skills. In recent decades, psychologists and cognitive scientists have begun documenting the role of stories, and particularly fiction, in refining our sociocognitive skills. In this essay, I focus specifically on how stories, particularly written fiction, hone our emotion recognition skills. I present a brief overview of existing theorizing and research (...) findings, and propose the less-is-more hypothesis, according to which emotion recognition skills are sharpened by stories that do not tell us, but rather show us the emotional life of fictional characters. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)

The goal of the current study is to investigate the effects of the distractive textual information on the activation of predictive inference online, and how the readers with high or low working memory capacity differ in their online activation and text memory. To test the two hypothesis of attentional competition and semantic integration, we conducted three experiments to investigate whether a local prediction and a global prediction, both of which could be derived from the description of a critical event, are (...) generated in the mind of the reader, and how this generation process is influenced by contextual and cognitive factors of the reader. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 suggest that the elaboration of the global aspects in the narrative reduces the local prediction, but makes the global prediction more salient to occur. The evidence from Experiment 3 confirms the hypothesis that even automatic processes are constrained by distant contextual factors, in combination with differences in working memory, and examines how referentially local and global predictions are intertwined in text comprehension. Overall, these data support the immediate integration hypothesis across sentence boundaries at different representation levels, as well as interaction assumptions of different processing levels within referentially local and referentially global processing contexts. (shrink)

We know that reading involves coordination between textual characteristics and visual attention, but research linking eye movements during reading and comprehension assessed after reading is surprisingly limited, especially for reading long connected texts. We tested two competing possibilities: (a) the weak association hypothesis: Links between eye movements and comprehension are weak and short‐lived, versus (b) the strong association hypothesis: The two are robustly linked, even after a delay. Using a predictive modeling approach, we trained regression models to predict comprehension scores (...) from global eye movement features, using participant‐level cross‐validation to ensure that the models generalize across participants. We used data from three studies in which readers (Ns = 104, 130, 147) answered multiple‐choice comprehension questions ~30 min after reading a 6,500‐word text, or after reading up to eight 1,000‐word texts. The models generated accurate predictions of participants' text comprehension scores (correlations between observed and predicted comprehension: 0.384, 0.362, 0.372, ps <.001), in line with the strong association hypothesis. We found that making more, but shorter fixations, consistently predicted comprehension across all studies. Furthermore, models trained on one study's data could successfully predict comprehension on the others, suggesting generalizability across studies. Collectively, these findings suggest that there is a robust link between eye movements and subsequent comprehension of a long connected text, thereby connecting theories of low‐level eye movements with those of higher order text processing during reading. (shrink)

What role do moment‐to‐moment comprehension processes play in visual attentional selection in picture stories? The current work uniquely tested the role of bridging inference generation processes on eye movements while participants viewed picture stories. Specific components of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) were tested. Bridging inference generation was induced by manipulating the presence of highly inferable actions embedded in picture stories. When inferable actions are missing, participants have increased viewing times for the immediately following critical image (Magliano, (...) Larson, Higgs, & Loschky, ). This study used eye‐tracking to test competing hypotheses about the increased viewing time: (a) Computational Load: inference generation processes increase overall computational load, producing longer fixation durations; (b) Visual Search: inference generation processes guide eye‐movements to pick up inference‐relevant information, producing more fixations. Participants had similar fixation durations, but they made more fixations while generating inferences, with that process starting from the fifth fixation. A follow‐up hypothesis predicted that when generating inferences, participants fixate scene regions important for generating the inference. A separate group of participants rated the inferential‐relevance of regions in the critical images, and results showed that these inferentially relevant regions predicted differences in other viewers’ eye movements. Thus, viewers’ event models in working memory affect visual attentional selection while viewing visual narratives. (shrink)

Literature reviews have traditionally been a simple exercise in reporting the current relevant research, both to provide an overview of the current status of the field, and perhaps to draw attention to controversies. From the perspective of positivist research traditions, it was important to neutrally report all the relevant research, which was assumed to be foundational. In this article, written for the Applied Critical Realism special issue of Journal of Critical Realism, I use my own research to illustrate how a (...) literature review might look if it were non-foundational and guided by the principles of immanent critique. Immanent critique is central to Bhaskar’s philosophical methodology but has not been much applied in critical realist empirical research. Following a brief introduction to immanent critique, its history and relation to other ways of grounding knowledge, an excerpt from a literature review is used as backdrop for an extended discussion about various potential applications, and impl... (shrink)

Narratives, also called stories, can be found in conversations, children’s play interactions, reading material, and television programs. From infancy to adulthood, narrative comprehension processes interpret events and inform our understanding of physical and social environments. These processes have been extensively studied to ascertain the multifaceted nature of narrative comprehension. From this research we know that three overlapping processes (i.e., knowledge integration, goal structure understanding, and causal inference generation) proposed by the constructionist paradigm are necessary for narrative comprehension, narrative comprehension has (...) a predictive relationship with children’s later reading performance, and comprehension processes are generalizable to other contexts. Much of the previous research has emphasized internal and predictive validity; thus, limiting the generalizability of previous findings. We are concerned these limitations may be excluding underrepresented populations from benefits and implications identified by early comprehension processes research. This review identifies gaps in extant literature regarding external validity and argues for increased emphasis on externally valid research. We highlight limited research on narrative comprehension processes in children from low-income and minority populations, and argue for changes in comprehension assessments. Specifically, we argue both on- and off-line assessments should be used across various narrative types (e.g., picture books, televised narratives) with traditionally underserved and underrepresented populations. We propose increasing the generalizability narrative comprehension processes research can inform persistent reading achievement gaps, and have practical implications for how children learn from narratives. (shrink)

Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...) psychology. Despite the ubiquity of causal reasoning, textbooks of cognitive psychology have neglected this growing field. The goal of The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning is to fill this gap. The handbook brings together the leading researchers in the field of causal reasoning and offers state-of-the-art presentations of theories and research. It provides introductions of competing theories of causal reasoning, and discusses its role in various cognitive functions and domains. The final section presents research from neighboring fields. 1. Causal Reasoning: An Introduction Michael R. Waldmann Part I: Theories of Causal Cognition 2. Associative Accounts of Causal Cognition Mike E. Le Pelley, Oren Griffiths, and Tom Beesley 3. Rules of Causal Judgment: Mapping Statistical Information Onto Causal Beliefs José C. Perales, Andrés Catena, Antonio Cándido, and Antonio Maldonado 4. The Inferential Reasoning Theory of Causal Learning: Toward a Multi- Process Propositional Account Yannick Boddez, Jan De Houwer, and Tom Beckers 5. Causal Invariance as an Essential Constraint for Creating a Causal Representation of the World: Generalizing the Invariance of Causal Power Patricia W. Cheng and Hongjing Lu 6. The Acquisition and Use of Causal Structure Knowledge Benjamin Margolin Rottman 7. Formalizing Prior Knowledge in Causal Induction Thomas L. Griffiths 8. Causal Mechanisms Samuel G. B. Johnson and Woo-kyoung Ahn 9. Force Dynamics and Causation Phillip Wolff and Robert Thorstad 10. Mental Models and Causation P. N. Johnson- Laird and Sangeet S. Khemlani 11. Pseudocontingencies Klaus Fiedler and Florian Kutzner 12. Singular Causation David Danks 13. Cognitive Neuroscience of Causal Reasoning Joachim T. Operskalski and Aron K. Barbey Part II: Basic Cognitive Functions 14. Visual Impressions of Causality Peter White 15. Goal-Directed Actions Bernhard Hommel 16. Planning and Control Magda Osman 17. Reinforcement Learning and Causal Models Samuel J. Gershman 18. Causation and the Probability of Causal Conditionals David E. Over 19. Causal Models and Conditional Reasoning Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater 20. Concepts as Causal Models: Categorization Bob Rehder 21. Concepts as Causal Models: Induction Bob Rehder 22. Causal Explanation Tania Lombrozo and Nadya Vasilyeva 23. Diagnostic Reasoning Björn Meder and Ralf Mayrhofer 24. Inferring Causal Relations by Analogy Keith J. Holyoak and Hee-Seung Lee 25. Causal Argument Ulrike Hahn, Roland Bluhm, and Frank Zenker 26. Causality in Decision- Making York Hagmayer and Philip M. Fernbach Part III: Domains of Causal Reasoning 27. Intuitive Theories Tobias Gerstenberg and Joshua B. Tenenbaum 28. Space, Time, and Causality Marc J. Buehner 29. Causation in Legal and Moral Reasoning David A. Lagnado and Tobias Gerstenberg 30. The Role of Causal Knowledge in Reasoning About Mental Disorders Woo-kyoung Ahn, Nancy S. Kim, and Matthew S. Lebowitz 31. Causality and Causal Reasoning in Natural Language Torgrim Solstad and Oliver Bott 32. Social Attribution and Explanation Denis Hilton Part IV: Development, Phylogeny, and Culture 33. The Development of Causal Reasoning Paul Muentener and Elizabeth Bonawitz 34. Causal Reasoning in Non-Human Animals Christian Schloegl and Julia Fischer 35. Causal Cognition and Culture Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller, and Douglas L. Medin. (shrink)

Whether non-human animals can have episodic memories remains the subject of extensive debate. A number of prominent memory researchers defend the view that animals do not have the same kind of episodic memory as humans do, whereas others argue that some animals have episodic-like memory—i.e., they can remember what, where and when an event happened. Defining what constitutes episodic memory has proven to be difficult. In this paper, I propose a dual systems account and provide evidence for a distinction between (...) event memory and episodic memory. Event memory is a perceptual system that evolved to support adaptive short-term goal processing, whereas episodic memory is based on narratives, which bind event memories into a retrievable whole that is temporally and causally organized around subject’s goals. I argue that carefully distinguishing event memory from episodic memory can help resolve the debate. (shrink)

Glenberg's account falls short in several respects. Besides requiring clearer explication of basic concepts, his account fails to recognize the autonomous nature of perception. His account of what is remembered, and its description, is too static. His strictures against connectionist modeling might be overcome by combining the notions of psychological space and principled learning in an embodied and situated network.

People typically show excellent memory for information that is central to an emotional event but poorer memory for peripheral details. Not all studies demonstrate memory narrowing as a result of emotion, however. Critically important emotional information is sometimes forgotten; seemingly peripheral details are sometimes preserved. To make sense of both the general pattern of findings that emotion leads to memory narrowing, and findings that violate this pattern, this review addresses mechanisms through which emotion enhances and impairs memory. Divergent approaches to (...) characterising information as central versus peripheral are also addressed. By directly contrasting these approaches, and the evidence supporting them, this review helps to clarify when and how emotion enhances memory and provides directions for future research. Evidence shows that memory narrowing as a result of emotion, and a number of violations of the memory narrowing pattern, can be explained by the view that emotion enhances memory for information relevant to currently active goals. (shrink)

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious (...) or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world. (shrink)

We present a method for improving local coherence in German with a positive effect on automatically as well as human-generated texts. We demonstrate that local coherence crucially depends on which constituent occupies the initial position in a sentence. To support our hypothesis, we provide statistical evidence based on a corpus investigation and on results of an experiment with human judges. Additionally, we implement our findings in a generation module for determining the Vorfeld constituent automatically.

Baars (1988, 1997) has proposed a psychological theory of consciousness, called global workspace theory. The present study describes a software agent implementation of that theory, called ''Conscious'' Mattie (CMattie). CMattie operates in a clerical domain from within a UNIX operating system, sending messages and interpreting messages in natural language that organize seminars at a university. CMattie fleshes out global workspace theory with a detailed computational model that integrates contemporary architectures in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Baars (1997) lists the psychological (...) ''facts that any complete theory of consciousness must explain'' in his appendix to In the Theater of Consciousness; global workspace theory was designed to explain these ''facts.'' The present article discusses how the design of CMattie accounts for these facts and thereby the extent to which it implements global workspace theory. (shrink)

Understanding how people comprehend visual narratives (including picture stories, comics, and film) requires the combination of traditionally separate theories that span the initial sensory and perceptual processing of complex visual scenes, the perception of events over time, and comprehension of narratives. Existing piecemeal approaches fail to capture the interplay between these levels of processing. Here, we propose the Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT), as applied to visual narratives, which distinguishes between front-end and back-end cognitive processes. Front-end processes occur (...) during single eye fixations and are comprised of attentional selection and information extraction. Back-end processes occur across multiple fixations and support the construction of event models, which reflect understanding of what is happening now in a narrative (stored in working memory) and over the course of the entire narrative (stored in long-term episodic memory). We describe relationships between front- and back-end processes, and medium-specific differences that likely produce variation in front-end and back-end processes across media (e.g., picture stories vs. film). We describe several novel research questions derived from SPECT that we have explored. By addressing these questions, we provide greater insight into how attention, information extraction, and event model processes are dynamically coordinated to perceive and understand complex naturalistic visual events in narratives and the real world. (shrink)

Humans have long been characterized as poor probabilistic reasoners when presented with explicit numerical information. Bayesian word problems provide a well-known example of this, where even highly educated and cognitively skilled individuals fail to adhere to mathematical norms. It is widely agreed that natural frequencies can facilitate Bayesian reasoning relative to normalized formats (e.g. probabilities, percentages), both by clarifying logical set-subset relations and by simplifying numerical calculations. Nevertheless, between-study performance on “transparent” Bayesian problems varies widely, and generally remains rather unimpressive. (...) We suggest there has been an over-focus on this representational facilitator (i.e. transparent problem structures) at the expense of the specific logical and numerical processing requirements and the corresponding individual abilities and skills necessary for providing Bayesian-like output given specific verbal and numerical input. We further suggest that understanding this task-individual pair could benefit from considerations from the literature on mathematical cognition, which emphasizes text comprehension and problem solving, along with contributions of online executive working memory, metacognitive regulation, and relevant stored knowledge and skills. We conclude by offering avenues for future research aimed at identifying the stages in problem solving at which correct versus incorrect reasoners depart, and how individual difference might influence this time point. (shrink)

This article reports on the difference between points of view in narrating a short story. The EFL learners taking part in the control group were required to recount the events from the third person perspective and the subjects in the experimental group from the first person perspective. The methodological frame of the study was based on Koven’s ‘content analysis’ of codification of various speaker role inhabitances, published in the Journal of Pragmatics. The results demonstrate that the first person narrators’ recall (...) performance and the length of their stories are closer to the original version of the story than those of the other group, which indicates a specific ‘orientation’ towards the sequence of events. This was seen in the patterning of clauses as well as in authorial and interlocutory double voicing speech in the first person narrators, which may be justified by the enhancement of two components essential to literary engagement: namely, ‘aesthetic reading’ and ‘personal response’ as parts of ‘critical focalization’. (shrink)

This study concerned the role of gestures that accompany discourse in deep learning processes. We assumed that co‐speech gestures favor the construction of a complete mental representation of the discourse content, and we tested the predictions that a discourse accompanied by gestures, as compared with a discourse not accompanied by gestures, should result in better recollection of conceptual information, a greater number of discourse‐based inferences drawn from the information explicitly stated in the discourse, and poorer recognition of verbatim of the (...) discourse. The results of three experiments confirmed these predictions. (shrink)

In this article I argue that two current accounts of scientific understanding are incorrect and I propose an alternative theory. My new account draws on recent research in cognitive psychology which reveals the importance of making causal and logical inferences on the basis of incoming information. To understand a phenomenon we need to make particular kinds of inferences concerning the explanations we are given. Specifically, we come to understand a phenomenon scientifically by developing mental models that incorporate the correct causal (...) and logical properties responsible for the causes or logical properties of the phenomenon being explained. (shrink)

The digital revolution has made a multitude of text documents from highly diverse perspectives on almost any topic easily available. Accordingly, the ability to integrate and evaluate information from different sources, known as multiple document comprehension, has become increasingly important. Because multiple document comprehension requires the integration of content and source information across texts, it is assumed to exceed the demands of single text comprehension due to the inclusion of two additional mental representations: the integrated situation model and the intertext (...) model. To date, there is little empirical evidence on commonalities and differences between single text and multiple document comprehension. Although the relationships between single text and multiple document comprehension can be well distinguished conceptually, there is a lack of empirical studies supporting these assumptions. Therefore, we investigated the dimensional structure of single text and multiple document comprehension with similar test setups. We examined commonalities and differences between the two forms of text comprehension in terms of their relations to final school exam grades, level of university studies and university performance. Using a sample of n = 501 students from two German universities, we jointly modeled single text and multiple document comprehension and applied a series of regression models. Concerning the relationship between single text and multiple document compr... (shrink)

Data literacy – the ability to analyze, interpret, evaluate, and use data and data visualizations – has become increasingly important for understanding and communicating information in the discipline of history. In the United States, curricular standards and standardized assessments already reflect this importance, but educators lack a clear picture of how students use data visualizations when reasoning about the past. How do students use data visualizations when reasoning about a historical question? To what degree does using data visualizations enhance students’ (...) historical reasoning? What challenges do students face when attempting to use data visualizations? This study addresses these questions, investigating how fifth-grade, eighth-grade, and high school students use data visualizations from typical school textbooks. Twenty-seven students were interviewed, surveyed, and asked to think aloud about a historical question while using a textbook entry that included a data visualization. Results from qualitative and quantitative analyses highlight the potential for data visualizations to enhance historical reasoning. However, results also indicate that students are unlikely to read data visualizations on their own, underscoring the importance of providing targeted data literacy instruction. (shrink)

A number of anthropologists have argued that religious concepts are minimally counterintuitive and that this gives them mnemic advantages. This paper addresses the question of why people have the memory architecture that results in such concepts being more memorable than other types of concepts by pointing out the benefits of a memory structure that leads to better recall for minimally counterintuitive concepts and by showing how such benefits emerge in the real‐time processing of comprehending narratives such as folk tales. This (...) model suggests that memorability is not an inherent property of a concept; rather it is a property of the concept, the context in which the concept is presented, and the background knowledge that the comprehendor possesses about the concept. The model predicts how memorability of a concept should change if the context containing the concept were changed. The paper also presents the results of experiments carried out to test these predictions. (shrink)

Text interpretation – the main interest of discourse analysts – is a central component of the text understanding process. In this article we introduce the Landscape Model, which describes the cognitive processes underlying reading comprehension in a detailed and precise manner. Moreover, this model captures the interpretative processes in which the human mind engages during reading. Within the context of the Landscape Model, we describe the relation between discourse understanding and discourse interpretation, and explain some of the phenomena that are (...) central to the field of discourse analysis as seen from a cognitive perspective. In the first section we describe the basic cognitive processes that underlie discourse understanding, as captured by the Landscape Model. In the following section we illustrate the way that the Landscape Model can be applied to the work of discourse analysts. We conclude by discussing the usefulness of the cognitive Landscape Model for the field of discourse analysis. (shrink)

John Swales’ 1986 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis’ was the first to apply citation analysis to describe in-text citations in the field of discourse analysis. Howard White’s 2004 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited’ was written by an information scientist and primarily focused on citation analysis and discourse analysis. Here, we cast a wider net by conducting a bibliometric analysis of discourse analysis to sketch its scientific landscape between 1978 and 2018. Our findings show that discourse analysis has (...) emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of language in social life. It is evident that discourse analysts are increasingly interested in such topics as corpus linguistics, digital conversation analysis, discursive news values approach, membership categorization analysis, multimodal analysis and social media. It is a general trend that the United States is no longer the only dominating publication powerhouse in the field. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and China are wielding a growing share of research output. (shrink)

The proposed multilevel framework of discourse comprehension includes the surface code, the textbase, the situation model, the genre and rhetorical structure, and the pragmatic communication level. We describe these five levels when comprehension succeeds and also when there are communication misalignments and comprehension breakdowns. A computer tool has been developed, called Coh-Metrix, that scales discourse (oral or print) on dozens of measures associated with the first four discourse levels. The measurement of these levels with an automated tool helps researchers track (...) and better understand multilevel discourse comprehension. Two sets of analyses illustrate the utility of Coh-Metrix in discourse theory and educational practice. First, Coh-Metrix was used to measure the cohesion of the text base and situation model, as well as potential extraneous variables, in a sample of published studies that manipulated text cohesion. This analysis helped us better understand what was precisely manipulated in these studies and the implications for discourse comprehension mechanisms. Second, Coh-Metrix analyses are reported for samples of narrative and science texts in order to advance the argument that traditional text difficulty measures are limited because they fail to accommodate most of the levels of the multilevel discourse comprehension framework. (shrink)

In recent years many scholars seem to agree that viewers’ interpretations play a prominent role in the influence of television news. However, a clear concept of ‘interpretation’ is still missing. This article proposes to conceptualize interpretation as the ‘representation’ of a news item as constructed and reported by a news viewer. More specifically, we look at this representation in terms of its complexity. Two aspects are important: first, the fundamental elements viewers use in their interpretation, and second, how the viewer (...) relates these elements to one another on a more abstract level. Together, differentiation and integration represent the complexity of the viewer’s interpretation of a television news item. The article provides definitions of these concepts and argues that interpretive complexity can be useful in studying the influence of television news. It concludes by outlining research questions in the field of television news using interpretive complexity. (shrink)

The emerging field of cognition and culture has had some success in explaining the spread of counterintuitive religious concepts around the world. However, researchers have been reluctant to extend its findings to explain the widespread occurrence of culturally counterintuitive ideas in general. This article develops a broader notion of social counterintuitiveness to include ideas that violate shared expectations of a group of people and argues that the notion of social counterintuitiveness is more crucial to explaining cultural success of surprising ideas (...) than the traditional notion of individual counterintuitiveness. Building on the context-based account of individual counterintuitiveness, the article also outlines how the once unorthodox cultural ideas become conventionalized over time only to be swept under the next wave of cultural innovation. By helping us peel away the layers of tradition that weave together the multilayered tapestry of culture, this account can be useful for understanding the development of cultural scaffolding that is needed to support the spread of maximally counterintuitive concepts such as widespread religious concepts of God and ghosts. (shrink)

This article reports an investigation involving a series of studies carried out to critically examine the hypothesis that presence of 2 or 3 minimally counterintuitive concepts in a story makes it more memorable than stories containing fewer or more of such concepts. The results paint a more complicated picture involving a number of interacting factors with contribution of the counterintuitive concepts to the global story cohesion emerging as a key mediating factor. It was found that addition of counterintuitive concepts only (...) makes stories more memorable if those concepts contribute to the global cohesion of the overall story. (shrink)

Reading is a complex cognitive task with the ultimate goal of comprehending the written input. For longer, connected text, readers generate a mental representation that serves as its basis. Due to limited cognitive resources, common models of discourse representation assume distinct processing levels, each relying on different processing mechanisms. However, only little research addresses distinct representational levels when text comprehension is assessed, analyzed or modelled. Moreover, current studies that tried to relate process measures of reading to comprehension did not consider (...) comprehension as a multi-faceted, but rather a uni-dimensional construct, usually assessed with one-shot items. Thus, the first aim of this paper is to use confirmatory factor analysis to test whether comprehension can be modelled as a uni-or multi-dimensional concept. The second aim is to investigate how well widely used one-shot items can be used to capture comprehension. 400 participants read one of three short stories of comparable length, linguistic characteristics, and complexity. Based on the evaluation of three independent raters per story, 16 wh-questions and 60 yes/no-statements were compiled in order to retrieve information at micro and inference level, and 16 main contents were extracted to capture information at the macro level in participants’ summaries. Still, only a fraction of these items showed satisfactory psychometric properties and factor loadings – a blatant result considering the common practice for item selection. For CFA, two models were set up that address text comprehension as either a one-dimensional construct, or a three-dimensional construct reflecting the three distinct representational levels. Across stories and item types, model fit was consistently better for the three-factor model providing evidence for a multi-dimensional construct of text comprehension. Our results provide concrete guidance for the preparation of comprehension measurements in studies investigating the reading process. (shrink)

This research examined whether induced joy influences fifth graders’ performance in literacy tasks. Children were asked to recall a joyful experience, used as a joy induction, before completing either a grammar (Study 1) or textual comprehension task (Study 2). The grammar task involved understanding at the surface level and retrieval of appropriate declarative and procedural knowledge, but limited elaboration unlike the textual comprehension task, which tackled inference generation. By differentiating tasks based on depth of processing required for completion we aimed (...) at testing the validity of two concurrent hypotheses: that of a facilitating effect and that of a detrimental effect of induced joy. Compared to controls, joy induced children showed better performance on the grammar task – specifically children with lower language ability. No differences across groups emerged as a function of joy induction on the text comprehension task. Results are discussed with respect to emotion effects on cognition. (shrink)

The presence of discourse relations can be marked explicitly with lexical items such as specialized and underspecified connectives or left implicit. It is now well established that the presence of specialized connective facilitates the processing of these relations. The question is to gauge how different degrees of explicitness affect the processing of discourse relations. This study investigates this question with respect to two relations, which are fundamental to our cognition and which are closely tied: causal relations and temporal relations. We (...) carried out a self-paced reading experiment, in which we sought to compare the cost of inferring the presence of causal vs. temporal relations in the absence vs. presence of a connective indicating a given relation in French. For the explicit marking, two types of connectives were tested – one specialized for each relation (doncfor causality andpuisfor temporality) and one underspecified (etin its temporal and causal readings). Overall, our results confirm the facilitator role of discourse connectives: we find that explicit discourse relations are processed faster than implicit ones. The specific (rather than underspecified) connective facilitates processing for temporal relations but not for causal relations; and temporal relations were read equally fast as causal relations. (shrink)

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice underradical uncertainty– situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people usenarratives– structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships – rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According to CNT, (...) narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels “right” to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences. (shrink)

This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Currently there is no consensus as to what makes a good literary narrative, how it is understood, and why (...) it plays such an irreplaceable role in human experience. The proposal thus identifies a gap in the existing research on narrative by describing narrative as a form of intersubjective process of sense-making between two agents, a teller and a reader. It argues that making sense of narrative literature is an interactional process of co-constructing a story-world with a narrator. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centered approaches that have dominated both structuralist and early cognitivist study of narrative, as well as pragmatic communicative ones that view narrative as a form of linguistic implicature. The interactive experience that narrative affords and necessitates at the same time, I argue, serves to highlight the active yet cooperative and communal nature of human sociality, expressed in the many forms than human beings interact in, including literary ones. (shrink)

McRae, Brown and Elman argue against the view that events are structured as frequently‐occurring sequences of world stimuli. They underline the importance of temporal structure defining event types and advance a more complex temporal structure, which allows for some variance in the component elements.

Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the (...) emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams. (shrink)

En este artículo investigamos la incidencia de tres formatos de presentación de información multisemiótica textual en la comprensión de textos escritos a partir de un pasaje retórico del género Informe de Política Monetaria. Para ello se diseñó un experimento con tres pruebas de comprensión, cuyos textos variaban en la preponderancia multisemiótica constitutiva: texto original, texto con predominancia del sistema gráfico y texto con predominancia del sistema verbal. Estos instrumentos fueron aplicados a 151 estudiantes de una carrera universitaria en el área (...) de economía, Chile, divididos en dos grupos: estudiantes de primer año de universidad y estudiantes de tercer año. Los resultados indican, por un lado, que no existen diferencias estadísticamente significativas entre las tres condiciones de las pruebas de comprensión, en cada grupo de estudiantes. Por otro, sí se registran diferencias significativas entre los resultados de comprensión de los grupos de lectores de primer y tercer año, particularmente a favor de textos que preponderantemente privilegian un solo formato de codificación de la información ; mientras que no se distingue por nivel de inserción disciplinar en textos que exigen una lectura integrada de los códigos verbal y gráfico. Se discuten implicancias de estos resultados para la comprensión de textos especializados multisemióticos. In this paper we investigate the impact of three presentation formats of textual multisemiotic information in the comprehension of written texts from a rhetorical passage of the genre Monetary Policy Report. To do this, an experiment with three comprehension tests was designed, in which texts varied in the constituent multisemiotic preponderance: original text, text with predominance of the graphic system, and text with predominance of the verbal system. These instruments were applied to 151 students at a university program in the field of Economics in Chile. They were divided into two groups: university freshmen and university third graders. The results indicate, on the one hand, that there are no statistically significant differences between the three conditions of the comprehension tests, in each group of students. On the other hand, there are significant differences between the results of the reading comprehension tests of first and third year university students, particularly, in favor of texts predominantly of one information encoding format ; while there is no difference in terms of the disciplinary university level in texts that required an integrated reading of verbal and graphic codes. Implications of these results for the comprehension of multisemiotic specialized texts are discussed. (shrink)