Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper discusses how the goals of a reader lead to reading as a planned activity. The external situation provides many of these goals, as well as background, which allow the reader to focus the reading activity. A system is described in which a plan for perusing a given piece of text is chosen with regard to the reading goal(s) and the structure and content of the text. As reading progresses and goals are satisfied or change, the plan is modified using adaptive planning. This model is supported by a protocol study of subjects reading instructions to use a fax machine for the first time. The main sections of this paper will: 1) describe reading in terms of a larger context of activity; 2) introduce the necessary components needed for a reader that plans; and 3) illustrate planned reading in the domain of device instructions.