Accessing distant premise information: How memory feeds reasoning.

Abstract

According to current psychological models of deduction, people can draw inferences on the basis of information that they receive from different sources at different times. In 3 reading-comprehension experiments, the authors demonstrated that premises that appear far apart in a text (distant) are not accessed and are therefore not used as a basis for logical inferences (Experiment 1), unless the premises are reinstated by a contextual cue (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the authors investigated whether these deductions are then integrated into the reader's situation model of the text. The results are interpreted in terms of a collaboration between memory-based text processing and higher level schema-driven logical reasoning.