Some Adaptive Consequences of Searching for Information in a Text
Lawrence T. Frase, Francene Silbiger · American Educational Research Journal · 1970
When a reader poses a question, or is asked to find some information, he must often search for related sentences in a text. As a consequence, he must a) establish criteria that will identify the relevant sentences, and b) process those criterial stimuli in the sentences he scans so that a decision can be made as to which ones contain the relevant information. The reader must respond actively to the stimuli upon which the solution of the problem is contingent. A recent study (Frase, 1969) indicates that these stimuli are likely to be remembered. But does the reader remember only the items that result in a decision to accept a sentence (i.e., the items for which he is looking), or does he also remember those that result in a decision to reject a sentence? Do items that enter memory as a consequence of this search retain their distinctiveness in memory over time? The present study attempted to answer these questions.