Do reading goals affect the reactivation of textual information? A study employing the contradiction paradigm

Abstract

  Previous research has demonstrated that readers reinstate prior information when reading narratives. This reactivation process has been seen as automatic resonance operating irrespectively of whether the input information is beneficial for comprehension. On the other hand, other online processes, such as online inference, during reading have been shown to be influenced by different reading goals. Inference and reinstatement are identical in terms of readers accessing memory representations. Accordingly, this study investigates whether different reading goals will affect the reactivation of prior information. Participants read some narratives on which they subsequently answered some questions or evaluated their level of sympathy with the protagonist. For both conditions, reading times for critical sentences were significantly longer when earlier descriptions were inconsistent with the critical sentences. These results suggest that the reading goal did not affect the reactivation of prior information, and resonance processes function differently from online inferences.