The availability of causal information during reading

Abstract

We conducted five experiments to examine readers’ access to backgrounded causal information in the absence of a local coherence break. Participants read surprise‐ending stories in which some story actions were explained by information in the preceding context, as well as information about the protagonist's ulterior motives disclosed in the story's conclusion. Some participants received information about the story's ending before reading the story, whereas other participants received no prior information. We found that participants who received prior knowledge about the story exhibited longer reading times for actions relevant to this knowledge, used this knowledge to explain the actions, and recalled more ideas from the story than did participants with no prior knowledge. We discuss the implications of these results for evaluating the constructionist model of inferential processing.