Three components of understanding a programmer's manual: Verbatim, propositional, and situational representations

Abstract

It has recently been proposed that in addition to verbatim and propositional text representations, a reader also forms a cognitive representation of the situations addressed by the text. This theoretical position was supported in three experiments which examined encoding processes, the cognitive products, and retrieval processes of the verbatim, propositional, and situational processing components: The degree of propositional and situational processing was successfully manipulated by varying the subjects' study goals. As a consequence of these differential encoding processes, subjects who studied for text summarization remembered more propositional information while subjects with a knowledge acquisition goal remembered more situational information. It was found that the situational encoding and retrieval processes proceeded faster than the respective propositional processes. In a sentence recognition task, subjects more strongly relied upon situational than propositional information, demonstrating the importance of situational representations in text comprehension.