The Role of Partial Matches in Comprehension: The Moses Illusion Revisited

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the role of partial matches in comprehension. It describes the processes that might be involved in making complete versus partial matches and when and why partial matches are noticed or not noticed. The experiments described in the chapter provide evidence to the typical finding that people ignore the distorted portion of a question and does not reflect a tendency to cooperate on the part of the listener. The chapter also focuses on some of the variables that may affect a person's tendency to use partial matching. Any model of memory processing must possess a number of critical properties such as (1) expectation-based processing (an automatic generation of default values and prototyping) and (2) a graceful degradation of performance in the presence of incomplete or distorted information. The parallel distributed processing (PDP) framework has been widely applied to simulating memory phenomena in general and its similarity-based processing features seem a priori very relevant for the Moses effect.

[1]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Learning internal representations by error propagation , 1986 .

[2]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 1: foundations , 1986 .

[3]  Janet D. Fodor,et al.  The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model , 1978, Cognition.

[4]  R. Ratcliff,et al.  Similarity information versus relational information: Differences in the time course of retrieval , 1989, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  Memory, knowledge, and the answering of questions. , 1972 .

[6]  M. Just,et al.  The psychology of reading and language comprehension , 1986 .

[7]  R. M. Warren,et al.  Auditory illusions and confusions. , 1970, Scientific American.

[8]  A. Glenberg,et al.  Inexpert calibration of comprehension , 1987, Memory & cognition.

[9]  M. Singer.  Toward a model of question answering: Yes-no questions. , 1984 .

[10]  Wendy Lehnert,et al.  Human and Computational Question Answering , 1977, Cogn. Sci..

[11]  S. Brédart,et al.  Moses strikes again: Focalization effect on a semantic illusion , 1988 .

[12]  James L. McClelland,et al.  On the control of automatic processes: a parallel distributed processing account of the Stroop effect. , 1990, Psychological review.

[13]  H. Grice.  Logic and conversation , 1975 .

[14]  L. Reder.  Plausibility Judgments versus Fact Retrieval: Alternative Strategies for Sentence Verification. , 1982 .

[15]  M A Just,et al.  A theory of reading: from eye fixations to comprehension. , 1980, Psychological review.

[16]  L. Reder.  Strategy selection in question answering , 1987, Cognitive Psychology.

[17]  Thomas Sanocki,et al.  Enhancing Calibration of Comprehension , 1987 .

[18]  M. Mattson,et al.  From words to meaning: A semantic illusion , 1981 .

[19]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  The development of sentence interpretation in Hungarian , 1985, Cognitive Psychology.

[20]  Roy Lachman,et al.  Evidence for direct-access and inferential retrieval in question-answering , 1980 .

[21]  James L. McClelland,et al.  A distributed model of human learning and memory , 1986 .

[22]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  Toward a model of text comprehension and production. , 1978 .

[23]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Distributed Representations , 1986, The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.

[24]  Arthur M. Glenberg,et al.  Calibration of comprehension. , 1985 .