Dixon, P. (1987). The structure of mental plans for following directions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13(1), 18-26.

Dixon, P.

1982

Dixon, P. (1987). The structure of mental plans for following directions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13(1), 18-26.

studie 3

This article outlines a general framework for understanding how people construct mental plans for carrying out written directions. In the framework it is assumed (a) that a mental plan consists of a hierarchy of action schemas, (b) that the hierarchy is constructed by beginning with the schema at the top level of the hierarchy, and (c) that plan construction goes on concurrently with other reading processes. Predictions made on the basis of this framework were confirmed in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 1, subjects were timed while they read and carried out simple directions such as 'Press button B while light X is on.' Directions were read more quickly when they began with the action ('Press button B') than when they began with either the antecedent or the consequence of the action ('while light X is on'). In Experiment 2, this effect was reversed by changing subjects' prior knowledge of what they were supposed to do. A third experiment showed that these results are specific to the task of reading and carrying out the directions; they did not occur when subjects merely recalled the sentences.

There was no overall effect of information order on reading time. There was an interaction between the order of the action and condition information, and whether the condition was an antecedent or a consequence of the action. The results of this experiment strongly suggest that the reading time effects found previously are specific to the task of following directions. In experiment 1 and 2 there was an effect of information order and no overall effect of temporal order. But just the reverse was true in the recall task of experiment 3. The most likely account for this difference is that the information-order effect occurs when the information in a sentence is used to construct a mental plan.

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