Knowledge acquisition from newspaper stories

Two experiments tested subjects’ acquisition of the information found in newspaper stories. Subjects studied either an actual newspaper story or an altered form of the story constructed by deleting the irrelevant and redundant information and restructuring the remaining information into either a narrative, topical, or outline form. Subjects who studied the intact newspaper story learned little of the irrelevant and redundant information compared to the other information in the story. Presentation of any of the condensed versions of the story led to better recall than presentation of the entire news story. However, none of the structural reorganizations of the text information led to consistently superior recall relative to a passage that deleted the irrelevant information but maintained the news story structure. These results suggest that people may select among several alternative structural schemata for the representation of narrative passages in memory.

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