{"pk":20861,"title":"Shaping Explanations: Effects of Questioning on Text Interpretation","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>Results in cognitive psychology have shown&nbsp;that readers can be steered away from an otherwise&nbsp;plausible interpretation of a story by&nbsp;extra-textual factors such as the source of the&nbsp;text, the stated reading purpose, interruptions&nbsp;and repetition of questions about the text. For&nbsp;instance, successive repetitions of the same&nbsp;question about a given text will often elicit a&nbsp;series of alternative interpretations of the&nbsp;text. This effect cannot be accounted for by&nbsp;established principles of text processing behavior,&nbsp;such as people's preference for cohesive&nbsp;and parsimonious representations of text. This&nbsp;paper presents a computer program called&nbsp;MACARTHUR, which models this behavior by varying&nbsp;the depth and direction of its inference pursuit&nbsp;in response to re-questioning, resulting in a&nbsp;series of markedly different interpretations of&nbsp;the same text. In light of the results, some&nbsp;new experiments are suggested in hopes of arriving&nbsp;at a new principle, beyond cohesion and&nbsp;parsimony, to account for the observed text&nbsp;processing behavior.</p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Submitted Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91k13811","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Richard","middle_name":"H.","last_name":"Granger","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Irvine","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1981-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/20861/galley/10594/download/"}]}