Testing psychological theories about inference making

Abstract

Two contrasting views about elaborative inferences in text comprehension are that they occur as the text is read and that they are deferred until they are made necessary by a question about the inferable information. This paper develops these views in greater detail and examines some of their consequences. The model of memory performance underlying the first of these theories has two quite different interpretations: the standard one and one in which inferable information, whether it is implicit or explicit in a text, is not encoded into memory for content. Two experiments are reported. The results are not consistent with the most straightforward interpretation of the claim that inferences are always deferred. However, that theory can be modified so that it makes the same predictions as its rivals. The various interpretations of the formal model underlying all three accounts of inference making can be distinguished only in terms of parsimony, explanatory adequacy, and their ability to handle results from other experimental paradigms, such as sentence verification. © 1982 Psychonomic Society, Inc.