Memory for the process of constructing an integrated mental model.

Abstract

We report two experiments in which people read descriptions of integrated spatial configurations, together with comparable descriptions that did not describe integrated spatial configurations. The integrated spatial descriptions, but not the comparable descriptions, thus supported the construction of a coherent mental model. In Experiment 1, each sentence of the comparable descriptions described the spatial relation between two objects that were not mentioned elsewhere in the description. In Experiment 2, the comparable descriptions were nonspatial, having been constructed by replacing the spatial relations with nonspatial relations. In both experiments, participants were given a surprise recognition test in which they had to identify each of the original descriptions--of both integrated spatial configurations and nonspatial configurations--among a set of distractors. When the sentences in the original description were reordered (and participants were instructed to ignore sentence order), recognition memory was reliably depressed, but only for the integrated spatial descriptions. Reordering descriptions does not change their propositional content, nor does it change the described situation; however, it does change the process of constructing a mental model of that situation. These findings thus suggest that memory for the descriptions retains a trace of the process of constructing an integrated mental model and that reordering the sentences disrupts this memory because the reordering reduces the similarity of the processing of the descriptions at recognition.