Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The goal of this research is to unify two different approaches to the study of text comprehension and recall. The first of these approaches, exemplified bythe work of Trabasso and his colleagues (Trabasso &Sperry, 1985,* Trabasso & van den Broek, 1985) views comprehension as a problem solving task in which the reader must discover a series of causal links that connect a text's opening to its final outcome. The second approach, typified by Kintsch and van Dijk(1978; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) emphasizes the importance of short-term memory as a bottleneck in the comprehension process. We combine these approaches by assuming that the most likely causal antecedent to the next sentence is always held in short-term memory.Free recall data from three texts are presented in support of this assumption.