Incorporation versus compartmentalization in memory for discourse

Abstract

Many experiments have shown that people use their world knowledge to aid in comprehension. The present paper addresses the issue of how this use of world knowledge is related to the equally important question of how and when newly learned information is incorporated into, and thereby alters, a person's world knowledge. The distinction between compartmentalized and incorporated information is characterized in terms of an associative network model, and this characterization is used to develop a measure of the degree of incorporation. This measure involves an examination of the ease with which subjects can recognize a newly learned concept as a function of the test context. Two experiments present evidence that the use of world knowledge in comprehension is correlated with this measure of the degree to which new information is incorporated into world knowledge.