Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of this paper is to compare the results of adults' performances in cued-recall and recognition of expository texts with the results of simulations derived from the construction- integration model proposed by Kintsch (1988. 1990). In the cued recall task, we manipulated three parameters: the weights of the connexions in the net, the size of the short-term memory buffer and the representations of the sentence used as a cue. The main results show that w e need to simulate the macroprocessing and the priw knowlegde of the learners to be able to increase the simulations. In the recognition task, w e simulate the representation of 4 levels (surface syntactic variation, close semantic variation, inference and distant semantic variationreferring to the same situation model than the text) using different connexion weights function the decay of the memory trace. The main results show the necessity to take into account these levels to explain the subjects' cognitive processes involved in a comprehension/memcM-ization task. For both experiments, the activation values obtained cOTTectly fitthe hierarchy of the experimental data.