| Abstract: | In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase. |
