TEXT REPRESENTATIONS AS REFLECTED IN PATTERNS OF COGNITIVE DISTANCE

Subjects performed a task that involved learning a text and then indic ating, for each of a series of pairs of words, whether they belonged t o the same Sentence of that text. When the principle of argument overl ap or causal coherence was the sole integrative factor in a text, nega tive response times and error rates reflected distances in the network representation predicted by the principle. When the two principles pr edicted conflicting representations for a text, response times and err or rates reflected the predictions of the principle of argument overla p. The results were interpreted as suggesting that network connections predicted by the two principles are both present in the memory repres entations of texts and that causal connections are recorded at a more abstract level of representation than are argument overlap connections .