Updating Situation Models During Reading of News Reports: Evidence From Empirical Data and Simulations

Abstract

Two studies explored the conditions under which readers update their representation of news reports in the presence of alternative plausible explanations for a target event. To do so, this study asked readers to read news reports that mentioned 2 different causes to explain the occurrence of a single event. This study manipulated which of the 2 causes was emphasized at the end of the news report. Experiment 1, through an inference judgment task and a simulation using the Landscape Model, evaluated which of the 2 potential causes was represented in the readers' final situation model. Experiment 2 collected think-aloud protocols to investigate the content of readers' thoughts when they were faced with alternative plausible explanations in accounts of a single event. The findings indicate that readers update their representation as new causes appear in the text but that the nature of the updating is a function of the order of presentation of the causes: They either select 1 cause over another or draw causal inferences between the 2 causes to maintain the coherence of their situation models under construction. These findings are discussed within the theoretical framework of the Landscape Model.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.