Question-answering strategies and conceptual knowledge

Singer, Murray

doi:10.3758/bf03335218

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The data of an unpublished experiment (Singer, 1991) complement Lorch's (1981) findings. Concept pairs from the same category, such as "geranium tulip," were embedded in lists in which the different pairs came either from similar categories (e.g., "iris plum"-two plants) or dissimilar categories (e.g., "iris cow" -one plant, one animal), Singer (1991) proposed the following analysis of the task: First, dissimilar different pairs form the counterpart of Lorch's (1981) unrelated false fillers.…”

Section: Unconfounding Answering Strategy and Searched Representationsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…1 Effects of this sort have been interpreted as providing evidence for the impact of distractor type on answering strategy (Lorch, 1981;Reder, 1987). Singer (1991) articulated the strategy analysis of this task in terms of the two-stage model of the comparison of concept pairs (Smith et al , 1974). In summary, the test items examined by Camp et al (1980), Lorch (1981), and Singer (1991) could be evaluated only with reference to semantic memory.…”

Section: Question-answering Strategies 193mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Concept pairs from the same category, such as "geranium tulip," were embedded in lists in which the different pairs came either from similar categories (e.g., "iris plum"-two plants) or dissimilar categories (e.g., "iris cow" -one plant, one animal), Singer (1991) proposed the following analysis of the task: First, dissimilar different pairs form the counterpart of Lorch's (1981) unrelated false fillers. They favor the comparison of concepts by evaluating their semantic overlap, a sort of plausibility computation (Lorch, 1981;Smith et al, 1974).…”

Section: Unconfounding Answering Strategy and Searched Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Independence of question-answering strategy and searched representation

Singer

1991

Memory & Cognition

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Because many studies of question answering, recall, and recognition have examined script-based messages, a spurious link between answering strategy and searched representation has emerged: Direct retrieval has been associated with the episodic representation of a discourse or a learned list, whereas plausibility judgment has been associated with general knowledge structures. Evidence of the independence of answering strategy and searched representation is presented. First, previous research and intuition both provide examples of the application of either strategy to either type of representation. Second, there is empirical evidence of the application of either strategy to both message text bases and general knowledge. Third, the effects offactors influencing strategy selection are independent of the type of searched representation. It is concluded that answering strategy is independent of the representation to which it is applied.The study of the psychology of question answering has resulted in the identification of different answering strategies. In particular, it is possible either to directly retrieve a questioned idea from memory or to answer by evaluating the plausibility of the questioned idea (e.g., Reder, 1982Reder, , 1987. The goal of this paper is to present evidence that question-answering strategy is independent of the type of knowledge structure to which the strategy is applied. For convenience, the target knowledge structure will be called the searched representation. It will be argued that, although the independence of answering strategy and searched representation is implicit in the psychological literature on question answering and sentence verification, the distinction between these dimensions has not been clearly drawn.The paper will be structured as follows: First, the current status of the analysis of answering strategies will be briefly reviewed. A potential confounding between answering strategy and searched representation is considered. Next, some studies that have not confounded these two dimensions but have also not clearly distinguished them will be examined. Finally, the theoretical implications of the distinction between these two dimensions of question answering will be considered. Question-Answering StrategiesThe cognition of question answering has been carefully scrutinized during the past 15 years. The ability to answer questions about text has been identified as an essential criterion of comprehension, more important than successful paraphrasing or summarization (Lehnert, 1977).

show abstract

Section: Unconfounding Answering Strategy and Searched Representationsupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: Question-answering Strategies 193mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unconfounding Answering Strategy and Searched Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Independence of question-answering strategy and searched representation

Singer

1991

Memory & Cognition

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There is other evidence in this realm that is suggestive of averaging processes. In one study, a uniform set of related distractors promoted a retrieval strategy whereas a mixed set of related and unrelated distractors was shown to support a plausibility strategy (Lorch, 1981; see also Reder & Anderson, 1980; Singer, 1991a, 1991b). In another investigation, people adopted a retrieval strategy when 80% of the test probes appeared in the referent stories, and a plausibility strategy when only 20% of them did (Reder, 1987, Experiment 1).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategies of text retrieval: A criterion shift account.

Singer¹,

Gagnon²,

Richards³

2002

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study scrutinized people’s ability to apply different strategies to randomly intermixed immediate and delayed test items. In three experiments, participants first read one set of stories. Later, they read more stories, and after each one, answered intermixed questions about that story and one of the earlier ones. The experiments cumulatively manipulated amount of delay, test probe plausibility, probe relation (explicit, paraphrase, inference), and testing procedure (mixed versus uniform delay). Using signal detection response criterion as the index of strategy, we contrasted the single criterion hypothesis, according to which one text retrieval criterion is applied to all test items, and a multiple-criterion hypothesis. The results consistently favoured the multiple-criterion hypothesis. The results also indicated that the presence of immediate and delayed probes mutually influence one another: Less extreme signal detection criteria were adopted under mixed than uniform testing. It was concluded that text retrieval strategy is continually calibrated with reference to the quality of the test probes.

show abstract

“…Taxonomic categories served in place of stories. Category judgments have previously served as a fertile realm for evaluating retrieval strategies in word and sentence recognition (e.g., Lorch, 1981;Singer, 1991), and signal detection analyses have been applied in this domain (Wixted & Stretch, 2000).…”

Section: Overview Of the Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%