Albrecht, J. E., & O'Brien, E. J. (1993). Updating a mental model: Maintaining both local and global coherence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19(5), 1061-1070.

Albrecht, J.; O'Brien, E.

1993

Albrecht, J. E., & O'Brien, E. J. (1993). Updating a mental model: Maintaining both local and global coherence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19(5), 1061-1070.

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This study investigated, in 2 experiments, whether readers experience comprehension difficulty when they read texts in which local coherence is maintained but global incoherence is introduced. Ss read passages containing an elaborate description of a main character presented early in the text that was inconsistent with actions carried out by the main character later in the text. In Exp 1, reading times for critical sentences were significantly longer when the earlier description and the critical sentences were inconsistent. In Exp 2, resolution of global inconsistencies improved memory for the regions of the text that involved the inconsistencies. The results are discussed within a mental model approach to comprehension in which readers attempt to maintain both local and global coherence.

The results support previous findings which showed that strategies that rely primarily on local coherence may not completely capture the nature of comprehension strategies used by readers. The current findings are more compatible with a strategy in which the reader checks both local and global coherence in an attempt to construct a single coherent representation around the main character. When the reader encounters new information relevant to the main character, that information is mapped onto information in explicit focus and onto other information already known about the main character that is in implicit focus .When new information is inconsistent with the established representation, comprehension difficulty will occur, even when local coherence is maintained.

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