Situation models and abstract ownership relations.

Abstract

Six experiments used a fan-effect paradigm to test whether people can use the abstract relation of ownership to help integrate information into situation models. People studied sentences of the form The [person] owns/is buying the [object] for a later recognition test. The integration of sentences into a situation model (as evidenced by an attenuated or absent fan effect) was observed when the verb phrase referred to a specific event (is buying) and the objects could all be bought in the same place (e.g., a drugstore). This organization did not occur either when the verb phrase referred to general ownership (owns) or when the items were unlikely to be purchased in a single location (e.g., television and car). It was concluded that although abstract relations can be used to segregate information into sets that can be integrated into situation models, this integration is more likely when it can be embedded within a spatial-temporal framework. People often understand statements by mentally creating models of the situations they describe (Johnson-Laird, 1983, 1989; Kintsch, 1988; Radvansky & Zacks, in press; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). These representations, which we refer to here as situation models, are mental simulations of the situations to which they refer. A situation model contains a set of tokens that represents the important entities of the situation as well as the functional relations among those entities. This article presents a view of how these representations have an influence on memory retrieval when they are created and how they are structured in cases in which the relations between entities are of a more abstract nature. Before considering how abstract relations may play a role in the organization and retrieval of situation models, we briefly review what sorts of organizational aspects of situation models have been studied previously. Research on the concept of situation models has covered a wide range of

Differential fan effect and attentional focus

“…The present study is concerned with a particular application of the mental-model view on memory retrieval proposed by Radvansky and his colleagues (Radvansky & Zacks, 1991;Radvansky et al, 1993;Radvansky et al, 1997). Therefore, implications of the present study for the mental-model view are limited.…”

“…The mental-model theory has been generalized to other materials (Radvansky, Spieler, & Zacks, 1993;Radvansky, Wyer, Curiel, & Lutz, 1997). Radvansky et al (1993) argued that person-location pairs follow different organizing principles, depending on the relative size of locations.…”

Situation models, propositions, and the fan effect

“…This pattern has been observed repeatedly (see Radvansky, 1999a, for a review of the literature). It has been observed for temporal (Radvansky, Zwaan, Federico, & Franklin, 1998) and ownership (Radvansky, Wyer, Curiel, & Lutz, 1997) relations as well as for spatial relations (Radvansky, 1998(Radvansky, , 1999bRadvansky, Spieler, & Zacks, 1993;Radvansky & Zacks, 1991;Radvansky, Zacks, & Hasher, 1996). It is important that it is not affected by the order of presentation of the concepts in the study sentences (Radvansky & Zacks, 1991;Radvansky et al, 1996) nor by whether definite or indefinite articles are used in the study sentences (Radvansky et al, 1993).…”

Spatial directions and situation model organization

“…It occurs despite instructions to organize by other means (Radvansky, 1998)-with definite or indefinite articles (e.g., the vs. a/an) (Radvansky et al, 1993), when the location serves as either the sentence subject or predicate (e.g., "the potted palm is in the hotel" vs. "in the hotel is the potted palm"; Radvansky & Zacks, 1991), with both text and picture stimuli (Radvansky & Copeland, 2006b), and in both younger and older adults (Radvansky, Zacks, & Hasher, 1996, 2005. It is not strictly a spatial effect, in that it has also been observed with ownership (Radvansky, Wyer, Curiel, & Lutz, 1997) and temporal relations (Radvansky, Zwaan, Federico, & Franklin, 1998). Basically, integrated representations do not produce a fan effect, whereas separately stored but related representations do (e.g., Moeser, 1979;Smith et al, 1978).…”