Connecting goals and actions during reading.

Three experiments showed that reading about a character's actions can reactivate a goal of the character stated earlier in the passage and backgrounded by intervening material. Ss were slower to read a line describing an action that was inconsistent with a goal of the protagonist than they were to read about an action that was consistent with the goal, even though both lines were locally coherent. Goals were reactivated even when the intervening material did not describe attempts to achieve the goal (Exp 2) and when the intervening material described another goal of the protagonist (Exp 3). The results suggest that reading a sentence can reactivate relevant information from earlier in the text, even when the sentence is coherent with its immediate context and the reactivated information has been backgrounded by several lines of unrelated text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reinstatement of causal information during reading.

An on-line word naming probe was used to test whether information presented earlier in a text, and then backgrounded by several sentences, would be reinstated when Ss were required to understand the cause of a currently processed action or event. In Exp 1, Ss named a probe word that represented an earlier-mentioned cause more quickly when it followed a causal coherence break than when it followed a neutral sentence. Exps 2 and 3 replicated this effect and examined 2 conditions that may affect the process of reinstating a cause: (1) inclusion of part of the context in which the cause was originally presented was not necessary to obtain reinstatement of the cause and (2) reinstatement of the cause was not evidenced when it had been disconfirmed earlier in the text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of perspective in the accessibility of goals during reading.

An implicit assumption of several causal reasoning models is that readers adopt the goals of a narrative's protagonist during text comprehension. In apparent violation of this assumption, readers participating in Experiment 1 of the present study drew inferences relevant to a protagonist's goal even when that goal was already satisfied from the perspective of the protagonist. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants were explicitly asked to view the text situation from the point of view of the protagonist. In this case, the goals of the reader and the protagonist should be the same. In these experiments, participants focused on the goals of the protagonist only when those goals had not been satisfied from the perspective of the protagonist. These results are discussed in terms of reader- and character-based perspectives and in terms of text characteristics that cue perspective taking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension strategies in the development of a mental model.

It is generally assumed that the comprehension strategy used in the development of a mental model for narrative texts focuses on information that is relevant to the protagonist. Exps 1a and 1b confirmed that readers remain sensitive to the location of the protagonist even when strategies based on text-base level representations predict this information should not be active. Exps 2 and 3 tested the stronger claim that readers adopt the perspective of the protagonist. Ss did not notice information that was contradictory from the perspective of the protagonist unless explicitly instructed to adopt that perspective. It was concluded that, at the level of the mental model, readers focus on information relevant to the protagonist but that they do not adopt the perspective of the protagonist unless characteristics of the text induce such a strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Updating a situation model: a memory-based text processing view

Previous research (J. E. Albrecht & E. J. O'Brien, 1993) demonstrated that readers were aware of an inconsistency between an earlier described characteristic of a protagonist and a subsequent target action carried out by the protagonist. In a series of 5 experiments, a qualification was added to the described characteristic that restricted the conditions under which the characteristic was operative. According to the here-and-now view of mapping, readers should use this qualification to maintain a fully updated model of the protagonist in active memory and should not experience comprehension difficulty when reading the target action. In contrast, according to the memory-based text processing view, the qualification would not be part of the active discourse model. Instead, it would be reactivated when the target action was read. Thus, readers should still experience comprehension difficulty. Results of all 5 experiments were consistent with the memory-based text processing view.     

Accessing global causes during reading.

In 4 experiments, the authors examined whether readers accessed distant causal antecedents for consequent events when the text was locally coherent and a more recent causal antecedent was available. Participants read passages that contained 2 possible causal antecedents for a consequent event; 1 appeared early in the passage, and the other appeared late. The early causal antecedent was elaborated in half of the passages, and neither causal antecedent was elaborated in the remaining half. Experiments 1A and 1B demonstrated that when the more distant, early causal antecedent had been elaborated, both it and the more recent, late causal antecedent were active in memory following the consequent event. In Experiments 2A and 2B, both causal antecedents were backgrounded prior to reading the consequent event. When neither causal antecedent had been elaborated, only the late causal antecedent was reactivated by the consequent event. However, when the early causal antecedent had been elaborated, only it was reactivated. Results are discussed in terms of several recent models of comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In Cinderella's slippers? Story comprehension from the protagonist's point of view.

Research on text comprehension shows that readers construct a model of the situation described in a narrative. A major factor in constructing a situational model is the perspective from which the action of the narrative is imagined. J. B. Black, T. J. Turner, and G. H. Bower (1979) found that adults recall a deictic verb of motion more accurately if it is spatially consistent with the point of view of the main protagonist. Recall is more accurate for the verbs come and bring if they describe a movement toward the protagonist; recall is more accurate for go and take if they describe a movement away from the protagonist. Thus, adults interpret movements in a narrative from the perspective of the protagonist. This study indicates that 3- and 4-year-old children show the same pattern of recall. They accurately recall verbs of motion that are consistent with the protagonist's perspective but make substitution errors on verbs inconsistent with that perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How Does Narrative Cue Children's Perspective Taking?

Three experiments with a total of 120 children between 4 and 9 years of age revealed systematic errors in the recall of deictic terms from a narrative. In some cases, the terms were inconsistent with the perspective of a protagonist. The errors occurred in all age groups and were at the same level whether the protagonist was "good" or "bad" but were less common in a narrative that did not include a protagonist. The pattern of errors suggests that children adopted a perspective within the narrative. Moreover, it seems that whereas the form of the narrative is sufficient to provoke a shift in perspective, children might find it even easier to adopt a perspective when the narrative content is about a protagonist. It thus seems that the form and the content of the narrative (that it is about a person) can combine to give a strong cue to perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading in perspective: What real cops and pretend burglars look for in a story.

Tested 2 explanations of how readers' existing knowledge structures (their schemata) function during reading. According to the selective attention (SA) hypothesis, activated schemata identify certain text elements as important and direct increased processing toward those elements. According to the slot-filling hypothesis, schemata provide ready structures into which relevant information can be assimilated without additional processing. Two experiments were performed. 55 Ss participated in Exp I and 106 in Exp II. In both experiments, Ss chosen to represent 3 naturally occurring perspectives (police, real estate, and education students) were assigned to 1 of 3 perspectives (burglar, homebuyer, control). In Exp I, text elements relevant to readers' assigned perspective were rated more important. In Exp II, text was presented by computer, and reading times for individual sentences were recorded. Results confirm the powerful influence of assigned perspective on recall. Consistent with the SA hypothesis, readers spent more time on sentences containing information important to their assigned perspective. Naturally occurring perspectives had little effect in either experiment. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preattentive texture segmentation: the role of line terminations, size, and filter wavelength

The delta/[symbol: see text] texel pair represents a dilemma in texture discrimination because, despite having the same component orientations, discrimination is still possible (Julesz, 1981), showing a performance asymmetry. Other possible element properties that could influence this task are line terminations, closure, and the size of these elements. We found that line terminators are critical for the task; however, results from double-task experiments indicated that terminator-based discrimination requires the use of attention. When attention is not available for the task, "size" of the elements (with the [symbol: see text] considered slightly larger) seems to be critical for this discrimination and for the asymmetric performance. To generalize the concept of "size" to textures in general, further experiments were performed with textures of different-sized elements. Results showed, as past literature has indicated, that there is a performance asymmetry, with the larger of the elements being more visible when the foreground. This asymmetry was additionally shown to reverse itself (i.e., the smaller element became the more visible) as the scale of the elements increased (while interelement distance remained fixed). A filter analysis was developed in order to measure the apparent size of these elements within textures (texsize), defined as the response weighted average of the filter wavelength, lambda, for a group of elements. The calculation of lambda was attained by introducing a nonlinearity after the second stage of filtering (or spatial averaging of filter responses). This analysis showed high correlation between the texture with the larger lambda and the more visible texture. On the basis of this correlation, a wavelength-dependent noise is proposed, having more internal noise for low-spatial-frequency filters and less for high-spatial-frequency filters.     

Significance of distal motor latency after carpal tunnel operation

Many microorganisms from the deep-sea display high-pressure-adapted--also described as barophilic or piezophilic--growth characteristics. Phylogenetic studies have revealed that a large proportion of the barophilic bacteria currently in culture collections belong to a distinct subgroup of the genus Shewanella, referred to as the "barophile branch." Many of the basic properties of barophiles that enable their survival at extremes of pressure remain to be elucidated. However, several genes whose expression is regulated by pressure, or which appear to be critical to baroadaptation, have been uncovered. One such operon, whose presence appears to be restricted to the "barophile branch," has been identified in DNA samples obtained from sediments recovered in the deepest ocean trench. In the case of another set of pressure-regulated genes, regulatory elements required for pressure signaling have been uncovered. The nature and regulation of these genes is discussed.     

Reprocessing text: Indirect measures of word and message level processes.

In three experiments we examined word- and text-level transfer after different reading experiences. Experiment 1 showed that facilitation in the later perceptual identification of a word occurs when that word was orginally read as part of a word set, but not when it was read as part of a meaningful text. Further, the word-to-word transfer effect exhibited the hallmarks of data-driven processing. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that transfer at the text level occurs when the reprocessing measure involves the entire text, rather than words taken from the text. This text reprocessing effect also exhibited data-driven indicators and was indifferent to the subjects' reading strategies. It was specific to the text originally read, with no generalization to texts of the same structure. The results, discussed in terms of P. A. Kolers' (see record 1976-00491-001) views of skilled reading, suggest caution in interpreting transfer measures when the original and reprocessing tasks are at different linguistic levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discourse-based emotional consistency modulates early and middle components of event-related potentials.

In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentence's last word was recorded. Some sentences described the protagonist's emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an emotional word. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)