Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We conducted an experimental test of the Graesser and Clark (1985) model of question-answering for why questions.This model specifies how individuals answer different types of questions by searching through various sources of information after comprehending a text. The sources of information include the passage structure and the generic knowledge structures which are associated with the content words in the query.After these knowledge structures are activated in working memory, search components narrow down a set of relevant answers. A subset of these components were tested in this experiment: (1) an arc search procedure specifying which nodes and arcs within an information source are sampled for answers to a why-question; (2)arc distance, the number of arcs in the representational network that connect the queried node to the answer node; and (3) the intersection of information between the passage structure and the generic knowledge structures associated with the query.After reading short stories, subjects were presented with questions and a number of theoretical answers to each question. Subjects were timed as they judged whether each answer was "Good" (appropriate and relevant) or "Bad" (inappropriate or irrelevant). Results supported the validity of the arc search procedure in that subjects robustly distinguished theoretically good answers from theoretically bad answers to specific questions.