Many studies concerned with text comprehension and memory have documented the importance of causal relations among text propositions. Events and actions that have strong causal connections are more quickly comprehended than less clearly connected propositions and are remembered better than events that are only temporally connected. Statements having more causal links to other text statements are rated as more important, are more frequently included in text summaries, and are better recalled. Comprehension times are speed of recall of facts from texts also have been shown to be a function of the pattern of causal connections among text statements. Such results are consistent with the assumption that causal inferences are an important part of the representation of a text in memory. Nevertheless, direct evidence is lacking that causal links are constructed during reading, that such links are part of a long-term memory representation, and that these causal connections play a role both in comprehension processes during reading and in fact retrieval following reading. The immediate objective of the proposed research is to test these implications of a causal structure position, using response time measures obtained reading and shortly after. We will attempt to probe the reader's active memory while reading text, and to test for links among causally related concepts and statements in the reader's memory of the text. The long-term objective is to develop a theory of text comprehension capable of specifying the cognitive activities of the reader, the memory structure resulting from those activities, and the consequences for memory of text. The proposed experiments will contribute to that goal.
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