Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Results in cognitive psychology have shown that readers can be steered away from an otherwise plausible interpretation of a story by extra-textual factors such as the source of the text, the stated reading purpose, interruptions and repetition of questions about the text. For instance, successive repetitions of the same question about a given text will often elicit a series of alternative interpretations of the text. This effect cannot be accounted for by established principles of text processing behavior, such as people's preference for cohesive and parsimonious representations of text. This paper presents a computer program called MACARTHUR, which models this behavior by varying the depth and direction of its inference pursuit in response to re-questioning, resulting in a series of markedly different interpretations of the same text. In light of the results, some new experiments are suggested in hopes of arriving at a new principle, beyond cohesion and parsimony, to account for the observed text processing behavior.