Selective recall of decision-relevant information from texts

Abstract

Subjects read and recalled texts of three different types: narratives, expository-descriptive texts, and expository-interference texts with high intersentence similarity. Target statements that contained some potentially decision-relevant information were embedded in these texts. Overall recall was best for the narratives, but target recall was relatively poor in this condition, presumably because the decision-relevant target sentences were perceived as being irrelevant to the macrostructure of the narratives. In the other two conditions, overall recall was lower, particularly in the interference condition, but target sentences were recalled significantly better. The recall of incidental, potentially decision-relevant information was optimal under the conditions of the present experiment when texts were only loosely structured; in tightly organized texts, such information tended to be suppressed. © 1984 Psychonomic Society, Inc.