A COMPARISON OF UPDATING AND EXPLANATION AS CAUSES OF THE INCONGRUITYEFFECT ON PERSON MEMORY

Information that is incongruent with a prior expectancy is remembered better than congruent information. Two explanations were investigated: (a) people attempt to explain incongruent information to understand i t, and (b) people use incongruent information to update their expectan cies. The common assumption in these two accounts is that the addition al cognitive processing stimulated by incongruent information is respo nsible for the incongruity effect. In this study, U.S. students were e xplicitly requested to engage in one or the other of these processes. Although both processes resulted in an incongruity effect, there was a positive correlation between recall of expectancy-congruent and expec tancy-incongruent items in the impression-updating condition but not i n the other condition; those in the impression-updating condition show ed greater expectancy change.