How prior knowledge, WMC, and relevance of information affect eye fixations in expository text



: Kaakinen JK, Hyona J, Keenan JM

Publisher: AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC

: 2003

: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

: JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION

: J EXP PSYCHOL LEARN

: 29

: 3

: 447

: 457

: 11

: 0278-7393

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.29.3.447


This study examined how prior knowledge and working memory capacity (WMC) influence the effect of a reading perspective on online text processing. In Experiment 1, 47 participants read and recalled 2 texts of different familiarity from a given perspective while their eye movements were recorded. The participants' WMC was assessed with the reading span test. The results suggest that if the reader has prior knowledge related to text contents and a high WMC, relevant text information can be encoded into memory without extra processing time. In Experiment 2, baseline processing times showed whether readers slow down their processing of relevant information or read faster through the irrelevant information. The results are discussed in the light of different working memory theories.



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