Why are poor comprehenders inefficient searchers? An investigation into the effects of text representation and spatial memory on the ability to locate information in text

Good comprehenders were more efficient than poor comprehenders when they we re required to locate specific pieces of information in a text, and there w ere qualitative differences in search strategies between the groups. Howeve r, the performance of the good comprehenders was more like that of poor com prehenders when they were required to search through a scrambled text, sugg esting that their search was guided by their representation of the content of the text. Although the groups did not differ in performance on a test of spatial memory, or on their ability to remember the location of individual words in a text, the good comprehenders were better at remembering the ord er in which specific words appeared in a text. This finding again suggests that their superior search strategies may arise because of their better mem ory for the order of events in a text.