Situation models in language understanding / Modèles de situation dans la compréhension du langage...

Situation models in language understanding

and in memory

Dr Emmanuel Didier

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Situation models• From:

– Zwaan, R., Radvanski, G., Situation models in language comprehension and memory,

– http://fr.scribd.com/doc/88959378/Zwann-Radvansky-1998-Situation-Models-in-Language-Comprehension-and-Memory

– Wikibooks, Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience,

– http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cognitive_Psychology_and_Cognitive_Neuroscience/Print_version

– Pennington, N., Hastie, R., Explaining the evidence: Tests of the story model for juror decision-making

– http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/LP_PenningtonHastie1992.pdf

– Schmalhofer, F., Situation Models and Embodied Language Processes,

– www.nbu.bg/cogs/events/2004/Schmalhofer_course.html

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http://fr.scribd.com/doc/88959378/Zwann-Radvansky-1998-Situation-Models-in-Language-Comprehension-and-Memory



http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cognitive_Psychology_and_Cognitive_Neuroscience/Print_version

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cognitive_Psychology_and_Cognitive_Neuroscience/Print_version

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/LP_PenningtonHastie1992.pdf



http://www.nbu.bg/cogs/events/2004/Schmalhofer_course.html

Situation modelsWhat is language comprehension?

• What is language comprehension?≠ construction and retrieval of mental representation of the text= set of processing instructions on how to construct a mental representation of the described situation.

=> importance of processing in short term and long term memories=> use of schemata as building blocks for the construction of situation models

ex. script for a restaurant visit = actors props entry and exit conditions action sequence typical of restaurant visit

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Situation modelsWhat is language comprehension?

• How do we go – from percepts, – to language, – to representation models?

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Situation modelsWhat is language comprehension? –

Representation models

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2 levels of representation

Zwaan (2004)

3 levels of representation

Fletcher(1994); van Dijk & Kintch(1983); Zwaan & Radvansky

(1998))

KIWi model

Situation modelsWhat is language comprehension? – Embodied

language processes

• Embodied Language Processes– amodal symbol representations– representation in perceptual symbol systems

– perceptual symbols– storing of perceptual symbols– cognition and knowledge– embodiement of memory– simulators– simulators and simulations

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Situation models Situation models and Embodied Language

Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Processes

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Situation modelsWhy models are needed

• Models are needed to:– integrate information across sentences

•Ex. speed at which the last word of a sentence is named depends on – how well it can be integrated in the situation model – not on its lexical associations to words prior in the sentence

– explain similarities in comprehension performance across modalities•Ex. students who saw a short film and students who heard a spoken version of the study that matched the movie in episodic structure – produced structurally similar recall protocols – only differences in the recall protocols between the two groups were due to content aspects.» text version explicitly stated that a boy was on his way to school; but in the movie, this had to be inferred

• We use modality-independent cognitive procedures to construct these models= people are good at constructing situation models across different modalities: written, auditory, visual

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– account for the effects of domain expertise on comprehension•comprehenders with relatively low verbal skills can outperform more skilled comprehenders when they have more knowledge of the topic domain– Ex. 3rd grade soccer experts recalled more idea units from a text about a soccer match (54%) than 7th grade novices (42%) = domain expertise more than offset the difference in verbal skills between 3rd and 7th graders

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• explain translation• Ex. La France était un pays de tradition Catholique.

(France is a country with a Catholic tradition.)Elle est à la base de la plupart des cérémonies qui ont une origine religieuse.(It is at the foundation of most ceremonies that have a religious origin.)

• explain how people learn from multiple documents

• text-based learning and reasoning about historical events– ex. events related to the construction of the Panama Canal

• multiple sources of information on the same topic overlap to varying degrees in terms of their referents and the relations among those referents

• an efficient means of organizing this information is to integrate knowledge from different sources into a common situation model

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Situation modelsWhen models are NOT needed

• Not all language processing tasks involve Situation Models– some cases of language processing do not necessarily involve situation model construction•Ex. proofreading

– situation models are detrimental to proofreading:» it takes more time to proofread if you refer to your knowledge of the situation than if you refer to your knowledge of spelling

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Situation modelsGeneral processing framework

•To analyze the process of construction of situation model and retrieval of situational information, we must distinguish:

• the current model– model currently under construction, at time Tn while a person read/speaks s a particular clause or sentence, called Cn

• the integrated model of the situations– global model constructed by integrating, one at a time, the models constructed at times T1 to T-1 while the person read/heard clauses C1 to Cn-1; and

• the complete model of the situations – model stored in long-term memory after all the textual/oral input has been processed

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Situation modelsModels of aggregation

• 3 models of aggregation of information:– increase of fixed capacity of short-term working memory (STWM) system by storing information in long-term working memory (LTWM)•parts of a previously constructed mental representation are kept accessible in STWM and made accessible in LTWM by using STWM retrieval cues

– integrated situation model: •explicit focus contains tokens corresponding to protagonists currently introduced to the discourse world

•implicit focus contains a representation of the currently relevant aspects of the scenes portrayed

– event-indexing model

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Situation modelsGeneral processing framework - Event indexing

model• Event-indexing model

– when people read/hear a clause, they construct a model of the situation denoted by that clause

– each event can be indexed on each of 6 dimensions:•time •space •causation •motivation •protagonists•objects

– ease with which an event can be integrated depends on how many indexes it shares with the integrated model

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Situation modelsGeneral processing framework - Event indexing model

Example: 1457 CCQ

• 1457. Every person has a duty to abide by the rules of conduct which lie upon him, according to the circumstances, usage or law, so as not to cause injury to another.

• Where he is endowed with reason and fails in this duty, he is responsible for any injury he causes to another person by such fault and is liable to reparation for the injury, whether it be bodily, moral or material in nature.

• Notes: – in which dimension of the model should we put “legal norms”?– notice the abstract characteristic of “law” compared to other dimensions

time space causation motivation protagonists objects

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model

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Situational dimensions:

FOREGROUNDING

UPDATING RETRIEVAL

SPACECAUSATIONINTENTIONALITYPROTAGONISTS 0BJECTSTIME

Relevance is updated continuously through3 operations:

• foregrounding • updating • retrieval

Situation modelsEvent indexing model - Space

• Mismatch between – language (2 x) -˃ linear – space (3 x) -˃ nonlinear

• No strong evidence that comprehender tracks spontaneously spatial information during comprehension– BUT able to do so when asked

• Linearization problem: how to describe spatial layout in language?– Ex. people typically describe their apartment by taking listener by the hand along an imaginary path through the apartment= path description is an effective way of linearizing spatial information by forcing it into a temporal format: "and then you get to the living room“

• NOTE: also a mean to distinguish between genuine/non genuine descriptions of places: path vs bird’s eye view?

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Space - Foregrounding

•Information foregrounding – once an integrated spatial situation model has been created, people can scan through different parts of it, making information from those sections more available•Ex . couch is more likely included in the foreground of the situation model when the protagonist is in the living room than if protagonist is in the kitchen

•Items farther away from current focus are less available than near items– response time is mediated by the distance between the protagonist and the room where the objects are located

– not tied to a protagonist’s spatial location, but to his/her mental location•Ex. people read stories containing a critical object. In half the stories, this object was spatially associated with the protagonist ( "John put on his sweatshirt before going jogging" ), whereas in the other half, this object was spatially dissociated ("John took off his sweatshirt before going jogging" ). Two sentences after the critical sentence, the name of the critical object (e.g., sweatshirt) was presented, and people made recognition responses. Response latencies were longer in the dissociated than in the associated condition, even though the distance in the text was the same.

•Readers have problems processing information inconsistent with the model– when information included in a text is spatially inconsistent with what has gone before, it takes people longer to read that information •Ex. when a story protagonist's location is different from the objects or people being described by a text, then people find this difficult to reconcile with their situation model, so comprehension processes take longer 27

Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Space - Updating

• People use spatial situation relations among entities to help form a coherent situation model.

• When information can be interpreted as consistent with a previous situation model, that situation model need only be updated.

• If no clear connection between new information and the previously described situation, updating cannot occur.

• Ex. when reading spatial descriptions:– people spend less time to

•read•understand, or•update spatial descriptions when they are referentially•continuous•contiguous than when they are referentially discontinuous

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Space - Retrieval

• Memory retrieval for space is affected by 4 variables:– spatial frameworks– spatial integration– retrieval set size– types of spatial representations

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Space - Retrieval– spatial frameworks

•used to interpret spatial relations between observer and objects in the environment

•pattern of information availability from memorized situation model is influenced by perspective adopted when creating the situation model– perspective of an individual in the situation:

» information described as in front » more available than information described as behind

– perspective of an external viewer: » both types of information equally available

•functional relations between objects can influence orientation of reference frame– Ex. hammer considered to be always above nail

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•spatial frameworks– information concerning spatial relationships between observer and objects is interpreted according to a spatial framework:1. above/under (gravity)2. before /behind (perception + movement +

interaction with world) 3. left/right (no difference in use)

– saliance differs according to perspective:•individual : before > behind•spectator : before = behind

– functional relationship among objects influences the typical relationship•ex. hammer above nail vs •hammer and golf ball

– Note: applies to W also =˃ L should take into account in examination / X-examination

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Space - Retrieval– spatial integration

•for integration of information it must be clear that all pieces refer to the same situation – otherwise people rely on separate models

•effect on retrieval: – memory performance

» better when information can be easily integrated into a situation model

» than when stored across a number of representations

•integration of situation-specific information:– occur only when a set of facts clearly refers to a single situation and situation models are used to make the long-term memory retrieval decision

•Note: applies to W also =˃ L should take into account in examination / X-examination

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Space - Retrieval– retrieval set size

•retrieval set size = nber of situation models in a retrieval set

•memory retrieval influenced by whether a set of facts w. overlapping concepts refers to – single situation (= situation model) or to – multiple situations (= situation models)

• Ex. People memorize sentences: "The potted palm is in the hotel," "The potted palm is in the museum," and "The pay phone is in the museum.“

• when presented with "The potted palm is in the hotel" as a memory probe, "hotel" model activated and also "museum" model because it also contains a potted palm

• ‘fan effect’: more irrelevant situation models take longer response time to be activated

• no fan effect when set of related facts refers to a single situation and is stored in single situation model=> when presented with "The pay phone is in the museum“ as a memory probe, although there may be other objects in the museum (e.g., the potted palm), the pay phone is not in any other model, so no retrieval interference occurs

•even in absence of cues to organization and structure, people actively evaluate what situations are described by the facts and organize the information around those situations 33


– Types of spatial representations– people can create fairly accurate mental representation of a space on basis of a description of that location from a text

– 2 most common perspectives provided in a text:•route •survey

– route perspective•describes movement as though a person were actually traveling within the space

•often contain spatial terms such as to the right, up ahead – survey perspective

•provides a bird's eye view of the location, as if one were viewing a map

•often contain spatial terms such as to the east or near the border –When asked to verify inferences about spatial relations not explicitly stated, people are as fast and as accurate for either type of description, independent of how they originally learned the space•suggests that people are using viewpoint independent situation models to verify these inferences

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Causation

• Listeners/readers routinely keep track of causal information

• These causal relationships can be – indicated explicitly to listeners/readers

•by causal connectives: because, so, therefore, consequently, etc.– inferred by listeners/readers using their knowledge of events •Ex. in "Cathy poured water on the bonfire; the fire went out“

•listeners/readers generate the inference that the water caused the bonfire to go out

•Inference based on the knowledge that water extinguishes fire

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Situation models Event indexing model – Causation –

Foregrounding

• causal relation between events described can be foregrounded by use of causal connectives: because, so, therefore, consequently, etc.

• causal connectives influence processing in an incremental fashion– as soon as reader encounters because, attempts to construct a

causal connection between previous event and incoming event– suggests that readers are highly sensitive to causal

connectives as cues to construct a causal links between events

• connectives– affects accessibility of the first event only if the two

events were moderately causally related;• if the events were unrelated, no facilitative effect observed

– facilitates on-line comprehension and increases cued recall for the clause following the connective, compared with non-causal connectives such as and or then 36

Situation models Event indexing model – Causation –

Foregrounding

• causal connective because – increases coherence of final representation of events described in sentence

– first mentioned event in a pair of statements is more accessible to the reader when statements are conjoined by because compared with when they are in two different sentences

– is an effective cue only when the events denoted by the two clauses conjoined by because are causally related

– no beneficial effect of because for events that had no (obvious) causal relation• Ex. "Susan called the doctor because the baby played in his playpen”

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Causation – Updating & Retrieval

• In most cases, comprehender can update the integrated model by forming causal connections between the integrated model and the current model, without being prompted by connectives.

• In such cases, world knowledge plays a crucial role.–Ex. 1a Mark poured the bucket of water on the bonfire.

1 a' Mark placed the bucket of water by the bonfire.1b The bonfire went out.1c Does water extinguish fire?

–Reader read sentence pairs such as 1a-b or 1a’- b, and presented with a question like 1c

–Reader is faster in responding to 1c after 1a-b than after 1a' - b •According to validation model used:

•knowledge that water extinguishes fire is activated to validate the events described in la-b.

•but because this knowledge cannot be used to validate l a ' - b , it is not activated.

•In event-indexing model terminology: •vent described in 1b is integrated with event described in 1a by causal connection

•1a' and 1b remain unintegrated on the causal dimension•although they would be integrated on the temporal and spatial dimensions according to the event-indexing model 38


• Events moderately related causally are recalled better than events – causally unrelated or – that have a strong causal relationship.

• ex. in a research, readers were 1. asked to study sentence pairs 2. presented on a computer screen, 1 sentence at a time, that

varied in degree of causal relatedness (strong causal relationship, moderate causal relationship, unrelated)

3. presented with the 1st member of each pair as recall cue for the 2d

– moderate pairs lead to the best recall, because: •readers are both enabled and necessitated to form a causal inference to connect the two events

•causally unrelated pairs do not enable readers to generate a connecting inference, whereas strongly related pairs do not necessitate readers to generate a connecting inference

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• Backward inferencing– person who reads about an event attempts to explain that event by using information from • previous sentence • mental representation of previously reported events--now in long-term memory

• world knowledge– By linking events through explanatory inferences, reader creates • causal network of the narrated events • by forming causal connections between events in nonadjacent sentences: "effort after meaning”

– Explaining events, actions, and processes is an effective comprehension strategy:• participants who received the explanation instruction increased their performance on a comprehension task by 10% over the control group. 40


• Forward inferencing– predictions about causal consequences of events– Ex. when reading "The business man didn't notice the banana peel," we can predict that he will step on it and slip

– predictive inferences are made during on-line comprehension when the stimulus materials 1. constrain the number of potential predictions, 2. provide sufficient context, and 3. foreground the to-be-predicted event

– predictive inferences quickly deactivated when there is no further information to support them.

• Research on predictive inferences suggests that

• readers are selective in drawing predictive inferences BUT– can draw them when prompted by foregrounding devices – can maintain them when there is sufficient context to sustain them

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Intentionality

• Comprehension of narratives revolves around keeping track of the goals and plans of protagonists

• People have – life themes that generate goals to be attained, – which in turn generate plans of action

•ex. one trains hard for a marathon (a plan), •to win the marathon (goal that generated the plan), or •to become a famous athlete (theme that generated the goal)

• Considerable body of evidence suggesting that comprehender keep track of motivational information during comprehension => goal plan hierarchy is highly important organizational mechanism for structuring narrated events

• Distinguish betwen goals– statement– information– structure

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Intentionality –

Foregorounding & UpdatingGoals statement • Effective foregrounding device during text comprehension.

•Ex. "Betty decided to knit a sweater" => goal on the part of Betty.– goal is maintained at a high level of availability in the reader's mental representation •as long as the focus remains on Betty and •until goal has been satisfied

Goals information Part of the causal chain of the story linking several ideas together, providing coherence to the story

• When a character’s goal is unsatisfied: – information relating to that goal is in a high state of availability (= retrieval cue in STWM to the goal in the integrated model in LTWM)

– information about goals already completed is less available (but > neutral information), thereby updating the current model (= no retrieval cue in STWM)

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Foregorounding & UpdatingGoals information • Often not stated explicitly in a text/dialogue =˃ has to be inferred

• Comprehender generates types of motivational inferences during comprehension:– more likely to construct superordinate than subordinate motivational inferences.: •attempts to infer the goal that motivated the action if that goal is not mentioned explicitly in the text

•does not infer more subordinate actions– ex. "Roger went to the grocery store," readers infer that Roger wanted to buy groceries but not that he drove to the store

• Reader updates situation models on the motivational dimension by linking actions to a higher level goal as opposed to lower level actions.– superordinate goal inferences contribute to reader's effort to construct a coherent situation model

– subordinate goal inferences do not• Goal information can then be maintained in a working memory buffer as retrieval cue to facilitate the incorporation of future events into integrated model

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Retrieval

Goals structure • Provides backbone for a person's understanding of the events described in a narrative. => this information is better encoded in memory and easier to remember later on

• In general, an increased number of such connections increases the probability of recall– except (cf Causation section), at very high levels of interconnectivity when recall may suffer because information is so interconnected that readers perform fewer elaborations on it => remember it less well

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Protagonists and

objects• One line of research focuses on anaphoric resolution: – does comprehender connect incoming information to tokens for protagonists or objects?

• 2 kinds of research:– whether and to what extent comprehender keeps track of protagonists

– whether comprehender instantiates objects when they are not mentioned explicitly in the text

• General conclusion: – comprehender (= listener, reader) appears to be intensively engaged in keeping track of protagonists during comprehension

– the amount of focus on objects appears to be more dependent on contextual cues

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Protagonists and objects

Foregrounding and updating• Comprehender is very sensitive to variety of linguistic cues

about use of pronouns (anaphoric resolution) • “focus model"makes predictions about level of activation of

tokens representing protagonists in working memory:– main protagonists (usually introduced by name): part of

explicit focus– less important protagonists: part of implicit focus

• When new scenario introduced, integrated model is updated by – maintaining in buffer the main character, and– removing from buffer the character bound to the previous

scenario • Use of a proper name increases

– likelihood of mention in a continuation task (in which people are asked to complete a sentence or text) and

– ease of referential resolution• Comprehender use their knowledge of domain and of properties of

protagonists to– resolve ambiguous pronouns with the main protagonist– integrate information from different sentences– keep track not only of protagonists and so of information

associated with them– incorporate immediately stereotypical gender information in

situation model

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Protagonists and objects

Foregrounding and updating• Objects, especially instruments for actions, are often left

implicit in texts– Ex. "Norm pounded a nail into the plywood wall“: no mention of

hammer• Instruments are not encoded during comprehension but inserted

during recall: – readers do not obligatorily instantiate instruments during

comprehension– But may do so under some circumstances not very well

understood; some potential factors:• accessibility of instrument• causal importance of object, and• reader's goal

• Reader may infer instruments when they were mentioned explicitly in the previous sentence:=> instrument inference is more likely when instrument has been

foregrounded• Generation of instrument inferences is influenced by more subtle

cues: function of the internal temporal structure of the event, as indicated by the verb aspect:– recognition latencies for instrument words mentioned in

previous sentences (e.g., "hammer") are reliably shorter when the action was described as ongoing ("Jason began pounding the nails into the board“

– than when described as punctual ("Jason pounded the nails into the board“)

• More relevant for comprehender to infer the instrument when it is still being used than when it is part of a completed action

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Protagonists and

objects - Retrieval• People can integrate information into situation models on the basis of person concepts rather than spatial locations

• Possible for a person to travel from place to place: participants create situation models that are organized around a person concept

• On a recognition test, fan effect is observed for multiple person-single location conditions but not for single person-multiple location conditions.

• A person-based organization was observed – using the abstract relation of ownership rather than the spatial relation of containment

– then on the subsequent recognition test with a fan effect for conditions with a single object being bought by several people but not for conditions with a single person buying several objects.

• But ownership relation is not adequate in and of itself to create situation models organized around a person concept: – information is integrated only when it potentially refers to a single situation, such as buying a collection of items at a drugstore

– no such organization is observed when the objects are typically purchased at different times and in different locations, such as a house, computer, or car.

– in that case, the person cannot become the basis for organization because people tend not to buy these sorts of objects in the same situation

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Time

• Role of temporal information in narrative comprehension has received relatively little attention in cognitive psychology

• Importance and ubiquity of temporal information in language: – every sentence obligatorily contains information on the absolute or relative time at which the event described in the sentence occurred

• Comprehender needs to know when the described events took place both relative to each other and relative to the time at which they were narrated

• How listener/readers make use of temporal information to construct situation models:– comprehender spontaneously keeps track of temporal information during on-line comprehension

• We know very little about the cognitive processing of temporal information in language, but much more about the semantics of temporal information in language

• Linguistic theories specify the interpretive options and the consequences thereof afforded by a particular linguistic structure

• Which options are selected by comprehender under which conditions is the domain of cognitive psychology

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Time - Foregrounding

• Languages have extensive systems for specifying temporal relationships among events and between the events and the time of utterance

• Studies have looked at the effects of temporal connectives on comprehension

• Temporal markers – are a way of making temporal relations explicit and thereby foregrounding them

– differentially affect the availability of preceding information:•“and” and the absence of a temporal marker (e.g., "He opened the door, went inside . . . . ") made previous information more available than a sequential marker such as “then”

• When information could be interpreted as being consistent with a timeframe, it could be incorporated into a single representation more easily than when the text signaled a change to a different timeframe and a different situation model would be involved.

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Time - Updating

• Temporal structure of sets of events does not straightforwardly map onto a linguistic structure, although people's conceptualization of time is linear as opposed to their conceptualization of space

• One reason why there is not a perfect match between the chronological and narrated order of events is that some events may overlap in time and yet have to be narrated in a non-overlapping fashion

• iconicity assumption : – narrated order of events is expected to match their chronological order– comprehender's default assumption is that each current model will be attached to the most recent event in the integrated model

• We can deviate from the chronological order by using temporal markers, such as adverbs– Ex. "Before he jumped the gate, he patted the dog"

•mismatch between the narrated and chronological order of events•such mismatches lead to decrements in text comprehension performance

• Minor violations of iconicity assumption lead to momentary increases in processing load during on-line sentence comprehension. – for ex. : reading times are longer for "He patted the dog before he jumped the gate" than for "Before he jumped the gate, he patted the dog."

– findings analogous to those in the spatial domain– if the structure of the text does not match the structure of the situation, comprehension is impeded

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• Strong iconicity assumption: default assumption in comprehension is that events that are narrated in adjacent clauses are contiguous in time– some linguistic evidence for a strong iconicity assumption: in Kâte language of Papua New Guinea, events that are contiguousin time are grammatically distinguished from events "that are separated by a lapse in which nothing of significance for the story happens

– in English, even if the distinction is not grammaticalized, it is plausible that time lapses in stories have psychological significance as well

– results of several experiments using sentence reading, probe recognition, and priming measures

– NOTE: would cause interpretation problems?• Situations in the world are often bound within a limited temporal range:

– if events move beyond the boundaries of either of these types of locations, then people should interpret the information as referring to a new situation and, as such, should create a separate situation model

• How time switches can affect the structure of the situation model:– when there is a large enough jump in time, people are likely to create a new situation model and carry over only those aspects of the previous model that are relevant to this new situation•references to scenario-dependent characters were more likely to occur in short time shifts than in long time shifts

•question answering times and reading times of sentences that referred to such scenario-dependent characters were longer for the long time shift story versions than the short time shift

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• Event in the current model will be attached to events in the integrated model that are within the same general timeframe

• But when there are no events within the same timeframe in the integrated model, a new timeframe is created in the integrated model and the current event is a retrieval cue to that timeframe in LTWM– this construction takes up cognitive resources and slows processing time

• Comprehender constructs temporal intervals and that information from within the current interval is more accessible to the comprehender than information from earlier intervals– not so much distance in the surface structure of the text that determines accessibility of information but distance in the situation model

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Situation modelsEvent indexing model – Time - Retrieval

• Plurality of time periods:– people experience interference (a fan effect) when retrieving facts in which an activity was described as occurring across several time periods

– no retrieval interference (no fan effect) when retrieving facts in which there were several activities occurring in a common time period

– so people can integrate facts about a common time period into a single situation model and reduce the amount of retrieval interference experienced later

– NOTE: see Ice Cream Wars: declarations by the policemen?• In cases where three activities were described, they were either

– all described in the same verb tense (e.g., all in the past tense) or – each in a different verb tense (i.e., one in the past, one in the present, and one in the future tense)

• No difference between the same-time and single-time probes: – suggests that people can integrate a set of facts referring to a single time period into a common situation model and that this has consequences for later memory retrieval

– NOTE: = embodiement?

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Situation modelsWhat L should do/not do

• L should take into consideration – in SPATIAL FRAMEWORK:

•Foregrounding: explain to J/jury relative positions/contiguity of objects/people

•Updating:– show/explain contiguity of objects/people

•Retrieval: – chose carefully perspectives:

» Insider (info in front more available) vs Outsider (info in front or behind equally available)

» Route (traveller) vs Survey perspective (bird’s eye view)– be aware of saliance and typical relationships of objects (ex. tools/weapons)

– Insist on spatial integration: describe unit as a whole– be aware of retrieval set size: if too many sets, use tokens, by naming the sets differently (the living room, the kitchen, etc.)

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– in CAUSATION:•Foregrounding:

– beware of causal relationships inferred by J/jury– create explicit causal relationships by causal connectives: because, so,

therefore, consequently, etc.» BUT need for REAL causal connection to make because efficient

•Updating & retrieval:– beware of world knowledge of comprehender in updating of the integrated model » verify in jury selection» explain to J/jury via testimonies, during summaries/pleadings » insist on causal relationships during summaries/pleadings

– beware of backward inferencing, especially in case of new developments» explain to J/jury how/why new information influences older situation model

– beware of forward inferencing, especially when derives from opposite party» explain to J/jury how/why new information should/not influence situation models which will be explained later

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– in INTENTIONALITY•keep track of the goals and plans of

protagonists, for J/jury, to facilitate their comprehension of narratives

•present and insist on goal plan hierarchy of protagonists, during examination, X-examination, summaries/pleadings through– goal statements: by W– goals information: by W, experts (hearsay)

» especially superordinate goal inferences – goals structure: by W, experts (hearsay)

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– in PROTAGONISTS:•use tokens for protagonists:

– name, nickname, pronoun» to places explicit focus

• ex. “Mr Jones”, “Mrs Petrus” • “The father”, “the little guy”, “the associate”

» to incorporate immediately stereotypical gender information in situation model

– in OBJECTS:•mention instruments explicitly

– to avoid implicit insertion during recall•organize person/object relationship, via

ownership– BUT must be single situation to be efficient

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– in TIME:•track

– absolute time and– relative timeat which the event described occurred

•use temporal markers (“before”, “after”) to – make temporal relations explicit and foreground them– affect the availability of preceding information

•remember the iconicity assumption:– narrated order of events is expected to match their chronological order» ex. "Before he jumped the gate, he patted the dog"

– mismatch between narrated and chronological order of events decreases text comprehension» ex. "He patted the dog before he jumped the gate”

•use homogeneous timeframe for events•be careful of overlapping time periods

– make temporal relations explicit to avoid retrieval interference

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Situation modelsStory model for jurors decision-making

• Important and useful research concerning the decision –making processes of jurors– applicable to judges?

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Story model for juror decision-makingFindings

– a narrative story sequence is the most effective "order of proof" at trial

– jurors instructed to make a final global judgment are more likely to adhere to an explanation-based judgment strategy

– the "wait until the end" global judgment strategy will lead to higher confidence in verdicts than a cumulative, item-by-item updating judgment strategy•trial judges usually instruct jurors to defer their judgments until all the evidence has been heard, thus, to adopt an explanation- based strategy

– Bayes's theorem does not provide a valid description of jurors' typical judgment processes•BUT this does not necessarily imply that statistical evidence or expert instruction on reasoning about probabilistic evidence will interfere with or degrade jurors' judgments

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Story model for juror decision-making

• Story model for judicial decisions– during the trial, jurors are engaged in an active, constructive comprehension process in which they make sense of trial information by attempting to organize it into a coherent mental representation

– story construction enables comprehension and organization of the evidence so that evidence can be meaningfully evaluated against multiple verdict judgment dimensions

– meaning is assigned to trial evidence by incorporation of that evidence into one or more plausible accounts or stories describing "what happened" during events testified to at the trial

– story organization facilitates evidence comprehension and enables jurors to reach a predeliberation verdict decision.

• Story Model includes 3 components:– evidence evaluation through story construction, – representation of the decision alternatives by learning verdict category attributes, and

– reaching a decision through the classification of the story into the best-fitting verdict category

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Story model for juror decision-makingStory model

• when the body of evidence relevant to a decision is large, complex, and the implications of its constituents are interdependent, the decision process is explanation based– decision makers begin by constructing a causal model to explain the available facts and then base subsequent decisions on the causal explanation they have imposed on the evidence.

• structure of the causal model will be domain specific. – For example,

•a juror uses narrative story structures to organize and interpret evidence in criminal trials

•different causal rules and structures would underlie – an internist's causal model of a patient's condition and its precedents – engineer's mental model of an electrical circuit– a merchant's image of the economic factors in a resort town– a diplomat's cognitive map of the political forces in an international conflict.

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Story model for juror decision-makingStory model

• 4 certainty principles govern – which story will be accepted, – which decision will be selected, and – the confidence or degree of certainty with which a particular decision will be made:

»coverage, »coherence, »uniqueness, and »goodness-of-fit

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Story model for juror decision-makingStory structure

• comprehension is inherently a constructive process, even for the simplest discourse

• Especially for trials, where evidence makes comprehension difficult:– lot of evidence, often presented over several days– evidence typically presented in a disconnected question-and-answer format:•different witnesses testify to different pieces of the chain of events•usually not in temporal or causal order•witnesses are typically not allowed to speculate on necessary connecting events such as why certain actions were carried out, or what emotional reaction a person had to a certain event

– subparts of the evidence (e.g., individual sentences or statements) are interdependent in their probative implications for the verdict => meaning of one statement cannot be assessed in isolation because it depends on the meanings of several related statements.

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• Story structure• mental representation constructed will coordinate and combine 3 types of knowledge into a story form– case-specific information acquired during the trial (e.g., statements made by witnesses about past events relevant to the decision);

– knowledge about events similar in content to those that are the topic of dispute •ex. similar crime in the juror's community

– generic expectations about what makes a complete story (eg, knowledge that human actions are usually motivated by goals).

• results in one or more interpretations of evidence in narrative form– human action sequences where relationships of physical causality and intentional causality between events are central

– story can be described as causal chain of events in which events are connected by causal relationships of •necessity and •sufficiency

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• Stories appear organized into units often called episodes • structure of stories plays an important role in the juror's comprehension and decision-making processes

• story constructed by the juror is a subset ofevents and causal relationships referred to in the presentation of evidence + additional events and causal relationships inferred by juror

– some inferences may be •suggested by the attorneys and •constructed solely by the juror

• inferences serve to fill out the episode structure of the story

• expectations about the kinds of information necessary to make a story tell to juror – when important pieces of the explanation structure are missing and– when inferences must be made

• juror may construct several stories, but one story will usually be viewed as more acceptable than the others

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• 2 certainty principles determine acceptability of a story and the resulting level of confidence in that story: – coverage and– coherence; – additional certainty principle of uniqueness, will contribute to confidence

• coverage of the evidence = extent to which the story accounts for evidence presented at trial– the greater the story's coverage, the more acceptable is the story as an explanation of the evidence, and the greater confidence juror will have in the story as an explanation, if accepted

• coherence also enters into its acceptability and the level of confidence (given that the story is accepted)– three components:

•consistency = extent to which the story does not contain internal contradictions•plausibility = extent to which the story is consistent with knowledge of real or imagined events in the real world

•completeness = extent to which a story has all of its parts• uniqueness =

– if more than one story is judged to be coherent, then the stories will lack uniqueness, and great uncertainty will result

• if there is one coherent story, this story will be accepted as the explanation of the evidence and will be instrumental in reaching a decision

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Story model for juror decision-makingVerdict representation

• phase of juror decision making which includes the comprehension and learning of the decision alternatives

• most of information for this processing stage is given to jurors at the end of the trial in the judge's instructions on the law, although jurors may also have prior ideas concerning the meaning of the verdict categories

• process of learning the verdict categories is a one-trial learning task in which the material to be learned is very abstract

• interference may occur from jurors' prior knowledge of concepts such as first-degree murder, manslaughter, armed robbery, and so on

• in the juror's decision task for criminal cases, the verdict representation stage involves the specification of each verdict alternative with certain defining features and a decision rule specifying their appropriate combination

• the conceptual unit is a category defined by a list of criterial features linked conjunctively or disjunctively to the verdict alternative, referring to – identity, –mental state, – circumstances, and – actions

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Story model for juror decision-makingStory classification

• final stage in the juror's decision is a classification process in which the best match between the accepted story's features and verdict category features is determined

• classification process is aided by relatively direct relations between attributes of a verdict category (crime elements) and components of story episodes

• law has evolved so that the main attributes of the decision categories suggested by legal experts (Kaplan, 1978)—identity, mental state, circumstances, and actions—correspond closely to the central features of human action sequences represented as episodes: initiating events, goals, actions, and accompanying states.

• story classification stage also involves the application of the judge's procedural instructions on the presumption of innocence and the standard of proof

• goodness of fit between the accepted story and the best-match verdict category – if not all of the verdict attributes for a given verdict category are satisfied "beyond a reasonable doubt" by the events in the accepted story, then the juror must presume innocence and return a default verdict of not guilty•If the match is not sufficient, a default verdict (not guilty) will result.

• If a match is above threshold, then confidence will be related to the goodness of the match

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Story model for juror decision-makingConstruction of decision

• 3 modes of construction of decision by juror:– Cumulative item-by-item (on-line)

•based on story construction•pieces of evidence weighted according to their role in the story

– Linear anchor and adjust (memory-based)•initial judgment made and then updated/adjusted after each piece of evidence

•heavily influenced by the most recent piece of evidence– Bayesian model (inference-memory-based)

•probabilstic inferences– cf Roberts, et al., The logic of forensic proof: inferential reasoning in criminal evidence and forensic science, http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~cgga/Guide-3-WEB.pdf

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http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~cgga/Guide-3-WEB.pdf


• Cumulative item-by-item and Linear anchor and adjust are equallly used by jurors

• Problems:– when people make global judgments, they forget to include some of the evidence

– item by item judgments show a consistent recency effect of the value of later evidence, consistent with the anchor-and-adjust updating strategy

– explicitly adding causal story connections to the case materials that strengthen one story shifts evidence evaluations in the story direction

– global assessments based on stories consistently result in more extreme judgments than item-by-item assessments based on considering evidence items separately, even though item-by-item judgments were based on exactly the same information

– story supplements have a greater impact on global assessments, when evidence is considered as a whole, than on item-by-item judgments, when evidence is considered piece by piece

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– ease of story construction mediates perceptions of » evidence strength, » judgments of confidence, and » the impact of information about witness credibility

– when evidence is organized by stories, subject » makes more decisions in the story direction compared with when the evidence is organized by witness

» makes stronger decisions in the direction of the preponderance of evidence than when evidence is organized by legal issue

» expresses more confidence in those decisions, and credibility information has more impact in those decisions

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Situation models in language understanding / Modèles de situation dans la compréhension du langage...

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