Human Processing of Knowledge from Texts: Acquisition, Integration, and Reasoning

Abstract

Decision makers must frequently assimilate a large number of facts from several documents, organize related facts in memory, and reason using the acquired knowledge. Nine experiments investigated how people learn and retain knowledge in texts and perform inferential reasoning (using several facts to generate or verify conclusions). Individual experiments examined the influence of text structure, the learnability of individual facts, the acquisition of new knowledge conforming to a previously learned structure, the integration of related but separately learned facts in memory, search and verification processes for inferential reasoning, and techniques for improving the organization of information in memory.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1979
Accession Number
ADA074002

Entities

People

  • Barbara Hayes-roth
  • Carol Walker
  • James M. L. Miller
  • Perry W. Thorndyke
  • Susan Knobel

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Analysis Of Variance
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Detection
  • Educational Psychology
  • Experimental Design
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Language
  • Psychology
  • Reasoning
  • Students
  • United States
  • Verification Tests

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Software Engineering.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.