Cognitive Psychology Of Comprehension Research Paper

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1. Definitions And Forms Of Comprehension

‘Comprehension,’ often used interchangeably with ‘understanding,’ can generally be defined as the solution of the problem of ‘the ‘‘how’’ and ‘‘why’’ of the connections observed and applied in action’ (Piaget 1978), but like many other psychological terms, it is used differently by different authors. The term means both the process (act of comprehending) and the product (an achieved state of comprehension) with more emphasis on one or the other. More importantly, comprehension is characterized as either high-cost or low-cost cognition. In other words, the core process of comprehension is regarded either as controlled-effortful or automatic-effortless, and is contrasted to other terms in different ways accordingly. For instance, according to Collins et al. (1980), understanding is a process of progressive refinement of models, and involves a variety of problem-solving strategies (e.g., rebinding variables, questioning a default assumption), as in solving a crossword puzzle. In contrast, Kintsch (1998) assumes comprehension to be a process in which ‘the majority of elements are meaningfully related to one another’ through automatic and effortless spreading activation. Thus, to comprehend means to adopt a coherent and plausible interpretation of pieces of information obtained from both outside and inside the mind (i.e., to satisfy multiple constraints), but it may or may not be cognitively demanding.

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It is sometimes useful or even necessary to distinguish a few forms or levels of comprehension. The depth of understanding may be expressed only in relative terms (‘deeper’ vs. ‘shallower’), but a frequent qualitative distinction is whether comprehension is explicit or implicit (Greeno 1983). For instance, finding a coherent and plausible interpretation for a target object or phenomenon produces differentiated and appropriate predictions about the target but may not always lead to explanations for it. Such forms are called implicit understanding. Another dimension differentiating levels of comprehension is whether the interpretation involves a causal device or only an empirical generalization. For example, a patient’s recovery from beriberi by consuming barley instead of rice can be explained either by referring to the well-known effectiveness of the altered diet or by referring to the causal device, that is, that barley contains considerable Vitamin B1, the lack of which causes beriberi. Moreover, even among causal explanations, some are considered to reveal a deeper under-standing than others. As indicated by Miyake (1986), an explanation at one level is what needs to be explained at the next deeper level. We can ask further, for instance, why the lack of Vitamin B1 causes beriberi.

2. Processes Of Comprehension

Comprehension is more complex and interactive than schema application, in which a relevant schema is triggered by one of its key words or headers and imposed on the given pieces of information. However, much of comprehension can be induced within a short period of time and often with little effort. Kintsch (1988, 1998) proposes the two-stage Construction– Integration (CI) model of comprehension to capture these features. The first stage of construction is for the generation of a variety of inferences (activation of related ideas through association). The second stage of integration is multiple constraint–satisfaction through spreading activation. As we will discuss below, this model fits especially nicely with the comprehension of ordinary (not experimentally deformed) discourse, because readers or listeners spontaneously and readily generate inferences as the discourse proceeds, and integrate inferred as well as presented pieces of information very rapidly.




However, both inference-generating and coherence-seeking processes may be time-consuming and effort-intensive for other tasks of comprehension, such as scientific inquiry. Those tasks induce what Hatano (1998) calls comprehension activity. Comprehension activity often offers multiple interpretations at one time, and compares their plausibility carefully by deriving and testing predictions from each of the interpretations being considered. It is not a process in which one holds onto the first idea that comes to mind or one waits for a single interpretation to emerge through spreading activation. A comprehender may feel uncertainty or puzzlement during this enterprise.

Plausible interpretations that are to be examined can be induced in a variety of ways both in low-cost and high-cost comprehension. Sometimes they are derived directly from prior knowledge including schemas. Other times a comprehender relies on interpretation-generation heuristics, such as modifying a parameter and observing what occurs. Still other times, candidate interpretations are brought about by analogies.

When people encounter a novel object or phenomenon, they may try to understand it by likening it to a highly familiar object or phenomenon. For example, at the time of Iraq’s invasion into Kuwait, many Americans (partly through the campaign by the government) likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, and thus justified their bombing of Iraq. Interestingly, some objected to the military action by analogizing the Persian Gulf War to the Vietnam War. This illustrates how people try to understand a novel phenomenon by referring to the instances in their past experience that they think are most similar, and how their reactions to the phenomenon are mediated by their analogy (Holyoak and Thagard 1995).

The analogies people make may involve structurally inaccurate mapping, and induce biased reasoning. Even a highly productive scientist like Kepler was misled by analogies at the beginning of his career (Gentner et al. 1997). However, analogy-based interpretations are often highly useful in comprehension activity, both in science (Dunbar 1995) and everyday cognition (Hatano 1998).

3. Experimental Studies On Comprehension

In this section we review three categories of phenomena of comprehension that have been studied extensively. They are grouped in terms of inputs: a set of observations, a set of connected sentences, and pat-terns of actions and their consequences.

3.1 Understanding As Identification Based On Observations

Recognizing something that is ambiguous as an instance of a concept or schema constitutes under-standing, because it is adopting a coherent and plausible interpretation of a set of observed features of the target based on relevant concepts or schemas. Once we understand the target object or phenomenon, we can make sense of the observations and can remember them much more easily (e.g., Bransford and Johnson 1972). Moreover, we can recognize the target’s essence or underlying process, and decide reasonably how to treat it.

The diagnosis of disease by reading X-ray films is a good example of such tasks of categorization or identification. The same disease does not always produce the same appearance on the film, and there can be several diseases that have similar appearances. Therefore reading X-ray films involves many inferences and requires a constraint–satisfaction process to reach a diagnosis. This is undoubtedly a process heavily dependent on prior knowledge, in which experts and novices would be expected to differ.

Lesgold et al. (1988) compared the abilities of expert and novice radiologists to make accurate diagnoses by reading x-ray films. The participants were asked to report a diagnosis after being shown chest X-ray films just briefly, and their protocols were analyzed. It was found that compared with the novices, the experts reported more varied findings (i.e., attributed specific properties to the film or the patient), their reasoning chains were longer, and a greater number of their findings were connected to at least another finding.

However, experts and novices do not make the same observations and then interpret them differently based on their different amounts of knowledge in natural settings. In a further study, the participants were required to examine the film as long as desired, while thinking aloud, and to dictate their formal diagnostic reports. Qualitative analysis of the protocols revealed that the experts exhibited more flexibility and were able to better tune their schemas to the perception of features in the film that were relevant to the specific case with which they were working. They could discount most of the obvious film features that the novices were likely to be misled to judge as evidence of disease symptoms, by using a mixture of technical knowledge about how the films were made and a better developed perception of the features.

Diagnosing films requires apparently simple out-puts, that is, whether there are pathological changes, and what kind of disease the changes are due to. However, the process of understanding is more dynamic and interactive than the top-down process of applying the relevant schema stored in memory or the bottom-up process of summarizing and abstracting collected pieces of information. Perception, inference, and memory retrieval are inextricably connected. This is probably true for the understanding of other targets.

3.2 Discourse Comprehension

Comprehension of discourse (including both narrative and expository text) is one of the most popular topics in the study of understanding. Here, the input in-formation is in the form of a set of spoken or written sentences, and the comprehender’s job is to form a coherent whole from individual sentences. Versions of schema theory (e.g., Schank and Abelson 1977) were predominant in earlier studies. However, as pointed out by Kintsch (1998), such top-down views have limitations: Discourse comprehension is interactive if not bottom-up, and it is much more flexible and context-sensitive than predicted from the schema theory.

Most contemporary investigators assume that to understand a story (i.e., a narrative text) is to build a microworld in which the described events are likely to occur. Kintsch (1998) calls this microworld the ‘situation model.’ In addition to the text-base that consists of those elements and relations that are explicitly described in the text itself, the situation model involves pieces of information that make the text-base coherent, complete, and interpretable in relation to prior know-ledge. These pieces of information are inferred from both the text and prior knowledge. Multiple situation models may be constructed from the same text (e.g., differing in the coverage or the mode of representation).

When people understand a story, they make inferences that are not given in the text. They sometimes infer that an event occurred, even though it is not written explicitly (e.g., from the sentence, ‘He took a subway downtown,’ the reader infers that the subject bought a ticket); other times, the reader infers how an event occurred, although the text does not give any concrete details. (From the sentence, ‘He bought a ticket with coins,’ one infers, ‘He used a vending machine.’) In other situations, readers connect two adjacent propositions. (From the two sentences, ‘Taro wanted to buy some tuna for sashimi at a discounted price. He went to the fish-market,’ one infers, ‘Taro went to the fish-market to buy tuna there.’) How many inferences are generated spontaneously may depend on the readers, texts, and modes of reading. Graesser et al. (1994) claim that the inferences that are needed to explain why given events occur and to establish the coherence of the text tend to be induced spontaneously as the text is being processed. How many inferences are based on conscious and deliberate attempts to build consistent and detailed situation models also depends on several factors. Kintsch (1998) proposes that a coherent situation model is built based on these presented and inferred propositions through spreading activation. However, studies using experimentally designed defective texts (e.g., in Collins et al. 1980) have revealed that text comprehension may require a number of effortful attempts to instantiate, co-ordinate, and even insert pieces of information.

Almost everyone is very experienced in discourse comprehension, because it is a major medium of human communication. However, knowledge about the topic of the discourse still makes a difference, especially in the generation of inferences. As a result, more knowledgeable people can build a richer situation model than less knowledgeable ones. They learn more, especially when the text is less coherent and thus requires comprehension activity on the part of the comprehenders. Schneider et al. (1989) demonstrated that students who knew a lot about soccer not only remembered the details of a given story about soccer better, but also made more inferences and recognized contradictions in the text more often than their age-mates who knew little about soccer.

3.3 Comprehension Of Procedures And Their Target Entities

Just knowing the procedures required to achieve goals differs from knowing how and why they work. By possessing knowledge to build mental models of the procedure-target combination (what the target is like and how it is changed by various procedures), we can grasp how and why these procedures work, modify the procedures flexibly, and even invent new procedures. Building such models is usually accomplished through a process of comprehension.

Kieras and Bovair (1986) showed that having a ‘device model’ (a mechanical version of the procedure- target model) that describes the internal mechanism of a piece of equipment enhances not only the participants’ learning of how to operate the equipment but also their inventing of more efficient procedures than the ones they have been taught. Their experiments compared two groups, that is, a model group and a rote group. The participants in the model group were presented with the device model in a fantasy context before being given procedural instruction, whereas those of the rote group learned the identical operating procedures of the equipment by rote. It was observed that the model group learned the procedures faster, retained them more accurately, and executed them more efficiently than the rote group. More interestingly, the model group could simplify inefficient procedures and infer new procedures much more often than the rote group, indicating the benefit of their deeper understanding. An additional experiment showed that what was critical was the knowledge about the internal structures of the components of the equipment, not the context of fantasy.

In the experiments by Kieras and Bovair (1986) described above, an externalized form of the standard device model was presented and explained. Active human minds often ask the questions ‘how’ and ‘why,’ even when they know that a given procedure works, and may construct a procedure-target model through comprehension activity. For example, the recipe for bonito sashimi sometimes induces comprehension activity, because it is not just the slicing of raw fish, but involves the steps of roasting the skin-covered surface quickly at a high temperature and putting the roasted side into ice-water (Hatano 1998). People may wonder why such a recipe is required, and if they comprehend it, they can modify it flexibly when they have to meet a different set of constraints, for example, when there is no ice or no source of searing heat. To understand a given procedure is, as in this example, to find a plausible interpretation for how and why it works. In other words, it permits the comprehender to infer what kind of effect each step of the procedure has on the target entity of the procedure. Thus, trying to generate to oneself an explanation for how a procedure is applied tends to enhance its understanding (Chi et al. 1989).

We sometimes engage in an even more ambitious attempt to reconstruct a procedure from its product in our daily lives, which is similar to the scientific inquiry that tries to model a process from its observed outcomes. For example, we may want to reproduce an unfamiliar but tasty dish (Hatano 1998). In an experiment, college students who were given a slice of perch mousse and asked to find how it had been made by tasting it (more specifically, to indicate its recipe) seemed to engage in comprehension activity. They often proposed ideas that they eventually discarded themselves. For example, they offered a number of possible ingredients, but rejected some of them both from their taste and knowledge about cooking. They expressed their feelings of uncertainty or puzzlement, as well as insight.

Although there have been few studies, prior know-ledge seems critical for the understanding of procedures. First, prior knowledge enables comprehenders to think of hypotheses. Second, it serves as constraints in the pursuit of coherence and plausibility.

4. Comprehension Monitoring And Repair

To understand something deeply, it is necessary to assess one’s extent of understanding, and to take appropriate action based on that assessment. How-ever, whether one understands is not obvious (whereas whether one has solved a problem can be recognized more clearly). To put it differently, every task of comprehension is inevitably ill defined. Therefore how well people can monitor their own understanding and how this monitoring ability develops are interesting questions in the study of comprehension.

Research on comprehension monitoring, following the pioneering work by Markman (1977), has shown that younger children tend to miss the insufficiency or inconsistency of a given message more often than older children or adults, but another line of research on metacomprehension has revealed that even college students tend to have this ‘illusion of comprehension’ (e.g., Glenberg and Epstein 1985). College students often believe that they understand a given text, though in fact they do not, at least as assessed by a multiple-choice test. This suggests that people have a general tendency to overestimate the adequacy of their own comprehension. People must be selective in directing prolonged comprehension activity, because it requires considerable time and effort. The illusion of comprehension guards them from engaging in the activity too often or in too diverse domains.

This tendency to overestimate the extent of comprehension may be due to the human ability to readily repair comprehension by supplementing pieces of missing information. Ackerman et al. (1991) observed that recovering coherence by adding a piece of new information by inference is frequent among both children and adults. People seldom suffer from the lack of comprehension for an extended period of time. This seems adaptive in the ‘wild environment’ in which quick decision-making and prompt action are required (Toda 2000).

As suggested by Schneider et al. (1989), it is likely that the more and less knowledgeable people differ in their ability to estimate accurately the degree of coherence among pieces of information and the adequacy of their comprehension. Humans seem to have a general tendency to make sense of their observations and actions, in other words, to derive coherent and plausible interpretations. However, judging whether the achieved understanding is ad-equate is a totally different issue. The criterion of adequacy may vary from context to context. There-fore only those who have performed many similar ill-defined tasks of understanding in the target domain can assess it accurately.

5. Comprehension As A Paradigm Of Cognition

As Kintsch (1998) aptly points out, many forms of cognition can be regarded as a process of constraint– satisfaction, and thus a process of understanding. Comprehension as a process thus represents cognition in diverse areas, as does problem-solving through searching a problem space. However, as we have seen, the process of constraint–satisfaction is not necessarily executed through spreading activation, nor is it automatic–effortless. The process of understanding is in a sense to solve an ill-defined problem, that is, to find a ‘reasonable’ solution to a problem for which only an incomplete set of information is given, using a variety of constraints. A set of constraints is provided by prior knowledge, but, in addition, interpretations of many related observations can be used as mutual constraints, as in solving a crossword puzzle. It is a process of maximizing coherence among the pieces of information, whether they are presented, stored, or inferred.

In terms of the function, understanding is primarily to make a best guess about what the external world is like, based on observations, and constitutes a core function of the mind, more specifically, of central systems (Fodor 1983). Understanding enables us to build enriched, stable, coherent, and usable representations of the world, which often serve as the basis for solving problems, that is, for changing the world as we desire. In this sense, understanding is an investment in an unknown future, and the human tendency to seek deep understanding, spending much time and effort,

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