Theoretical models of text processing, such as the construction-integration framework, pose fundamental questions about causal inference making that are not easily addressed by behavioral studies. In particular, a common result is that causal relatedness has a different effect on text reading times than on memory for the text: Whereas reading times increase linearly as causal relatedness decrea...

Policy problems like “What should we do about global warming?” are ill-defined in large part because we do not agree on a system to represent them the way we agree Algebra problems should be represented by equations. As a first step toward building a policy deliberation tutor, we investigated: (a) whether causal diagrams help students learn to evaluate policy options, (b) whether constructing d...

New text as data techniques offer a great promise: the ability to inductively discover measures that are useful for testing social science theories of interest from large collections of text. We introduce a conceptual framework for making causal inferences with discovered measures as a treatment or outcome. Our framework enables researchers to discover high-dimensional textual interventions and...

Because characters’ goals play a key role in the structure of narratives, the ability to make inferences about goals is essential to narrative comprehension. Despite their importance, no previous studies have examined the process by which children make these goal inferences. In the current study, we examined 6and 8-year-old children’s goal inference making processes through think-aloud protocol...

Although it has been consistently shown that readers generate bridging inferences during story comprehension, little is currently known about the neural substrates involved when people generate inferences and how these substrates shift with factors that facilitate or impede inferences, such as whether inferences are highly predictable or unpredictable. In the current study, functional magnetic ...

0747-5632/$ see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.01.041 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Laboratoire Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs EA 3082, Université Lyon(2) – 5, Av. Mendès-France, 69676 Bron Cédex, France. Tel.: +33 478772437. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (J. Ecalle). 1 ’’Some tasks at this level...