Abstract
The present studies were based on the hypothesis that the majority of college students have available to them the appropriate schema for understanding set inclusion relations, but that various factors influence the likelihood that the schema is used in the processing of text containing artificial inclusion relations. Although group data did not support this hypothesis, the data of individual subjects could be readily interpreted as resulting from the selection of one of a small set of representational schemata. Among the factors shown to influence schema selection were the choice of sentence frame used to present each relation, the presence or absence of real-world contextual information, and the structure (simple vs. complex) of the underlying inclusion relation. In addition, one experiment showed that the processes used in constructing a mental representation of an inclusion relation and in retrieving information from the representation are similar to those used with linear orderings.
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Smith, K. H., & Mynatt, B. T.Effects of presentation order on construction of complete and partial orders. Paper presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Denver, November 1975.
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This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS-77-16860 to both authors. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 were presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, San Antonio, Texas, November 1978. Appreciation is expressed to Ken Tohinaka for his patient discussions of logic.
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Mynatt, B.T., Smith, K.H. Processing of text containing artificial inclusion relations. Memory & Cognition 7, 390–400 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196944
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196944