Availability and Accessibility of Information and Causal Inferences From Scientific Text

Abstract

In these experiments, we examine inferences from simple scientific passages that provided all inference-relevant information for the reader. In Experiment 1, we use a contradiction paradigm to test whether readers compute causal bridging inferences from scientific text. In Experiments 2 and 3, we use the same methodology but vary the availability of the critical information by manipulating the distance between critical pieces of information. The results of the experiments indicate that causal bridging inferences can be computed from scientific text when all the necessary information is available and accessible.