People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

/pdf/unskilled-and-unaware-of-it-how-difficulties-in-recognizing-1eehsjerwq.pdf

Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

Relevance Communication And Cognition

The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations.

/pdf/anticipating-upcoming-words-in-discourse-evidence-from-erps-11yn3j2tf4.pdf

Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: Evidence from ERPs and reading times

Emotion and Meaning in Music

An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval

Participants remembered a short set of words while read- ing syntactically complex sentences (object-extracted clefts) and syn- tactically simpler sentences (subject-extracted clefts) in a memory-load study. The study also manipulated whether the words in the set and the words in the sentence were of matched or unmatched types (common nouns vs. proper names). Performance in sentence comprehension was worse for complex sentences than for simpler sentences, and this effect was greater when the type of words in the memory load matched the type of words in the sentence. These results indicate that syntactic processing is not modular, instead suggesting that it relies on working memory resources that are used for other nonsyntactic processes. Fur- ther, the results indicate that similarity-based interference is an im- portant constraint on information processing that can be overcome to some degree during language comprehension by using the coherence of language to construct integrated representations of meaning.

/pdf/memory-load-interference-in-syntactic-processing-2fcifhxo8y.pdf

Memory-Load Interference in Syntactic Processing

Prevalence and persistence of predictive inferences

Past research has been inconsistent regarding the extent to which forward inferences are activated and encoded during reading. To investigate the prevalence and the time course of forward inferences, 3 different tasks were employed. In Experiment 1, participants’ naming times were facilitated to a probe word when it represented a predicted action, both when that action was highly predictable and when it was only moderately predictable. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants were slow to read a subsequent sentence that contradicted the intended inference, indicating that the inference had been encoded and retained in working memory in both the high‐and low‐predictability conditions. In Experiment 4, the results of a recall task suggest that the high‐predictability forward inferences were encoded into the long‐term memory representation of the text. These findings suggest that forward inferences may be more prevalent and more persistent than has been indicated previously.

Forward Inferences: From Activation to Long-Term Memory.

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the process by which location information in narratives is represented in memory and the nature of the resulting memory representation. In Experiments 1 and 2, the results of a recognition task demonstrated that location shifts led to an immediate decrease in the accessibility in memory of protagonists' former locations. In Experiment 3, regardless of the amount of backgrounding after the last mention of the critical location (“the forest”), reference to an implied, location-typical entity (“the trees”) was read equally fast as long as the protagonist remained in that location. In contrast to previous findings, we conclude that when location information is salient in a narrative it is included in readers' situation models, being updated immediately and remaining highly accessible even several sentences after it was last mentioned.

/pdf/tracking-of-spatial-information-in-narratives-3rxatvehvu.pdf

William H. Levine

Papers

Memory-Load Interference in Syntactic Processing

Prevalence and persistence of predictive inferences

Forward Inferences: From Activation to Long-Term Memory.

Tracking of spatial information in narratives.

When Anaphor Resolution Fails