Individual Differences in Structure Building: Impacts on Comprehension and Learning, Theoretical Underpinnings, and Support for Less Able Structure Builders

Abstract

In this article, we highlight an underappreciated individual difference: structure building. Structure building is integral to many everyday activities and involves creating coherent mental representations of conversations, texts, pictorial stories, and other events. People vary in this ability in a way not generally captured by other better known concepts and individual difference measures. Individuals with lower structure-building ability consistently perform worse on a range of comprehension and learning measures than do individuals with higher structure-building ability, both in the laboratory and in the classroom. Problems include a range of comprehension processes, including encoding factual content, inhibiting irrelevant information, and constructing a cohesive situation model of a text or conversation. Despite these problems, recent research is encouraging in that techniques to improve the learning outcomes for low-ability structure builders have been identified. We argue that the accumulated research warrants the recognition of structure building as an important individual difference in cognitive functioning and that additional theoretical work is needed to understand the underpinnings of structure-building deficits.

The Multifaceted Role of Self‐Generated Question Asking in Curiosity‐Driven Learning

“…Alternatively, participants who did not ask about the gaps may have sensed that something was missing from the statement, but were not able to articulate what it was (cf. Boyce‐Jacino & DeDeo, 2020; McDaniel, Marsh, & Gouravajhala, 2022). In this case, the participants' self‐reported curiosity may be lower because they were not exactly sure what information could be acquired.…”

“…Question asking is the product of underexplored processes, where one generates a representation that allows for gap detection. By shifting our viewpoint to focus on the mental representations in which gaps arise, we can improve our understanding of the cognitive processes and neural substrates that facilitate comprehension and learning (McDaniel et al., 2022; Tawfik et al., 2020). Future research can provide more direct measures of an individual's mental representation, allowing for the formalization of information gaps (e.g., missing entities and relationships).…”

A comparison of memories of fiction and autobiographical memories.

“…Models derived from text, auditory narratives, movies, pictures, or even video games (Gernsbacher et al, 1990; Magliano et al, 2001; 2014; Radvansky & Copeland, 2006) exhibit similar properties. Such similarities led Gernsbacher and colleagues (1990) to develop a structure-building framework that explicitly posits that comprehension of any information, regardless of modality, involves general cognitive processes (see also McDaniel et al, in press). This idea of a single system is parsimonious and fitting, given that this system almost certainly evolved prior to the development of written language (Boyd, 2009).…”