Why Are Poor Comprehenders Inefficient Searchers? An Investigation into the Effects of Text Representation and Spatial Memory on the Ability To Locate Information in Text.

By M. Cataldo, Jane Oakhill. 2000

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Good comprehenders were more efficient than poor comprehenders when they were required to locate specific pieces of information in a text, and there were qualitative differences in search strategies between the groups. However, the performance of the good comprehenders was more like that of poor comprehenders when they were required to search through a scrambled text, suggesting that their search was guided by their representation of the content of the text. Although the groups did not differ in performance on a test of spatial memory, or on their ability to remember the location of individual words in a text, the good comprehenders were better at remembering the order in which specific words appeared in a text. This finding again suggests that their superior search strategies may arise because of their better memory for the order of events in a text.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f40b965fbf9dbe4b7df5621301645b9d99301c5

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Coh-Metrix: Capturing Linguistic Features of Cohesion (2010, background): “Cataldo and Oakhill (2000) explored whether skilled readers have an advantage in locating information in the text, and whether that advantage is related to their ability to form a more organized representation of the text content.”
Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension (2013, background): “We know from empirical and theoretical research that having a good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text supports reading comprehension (Baccino & Pynte, 1994; Cataldo & Oakhill, 2000; Kintsch, 1998; Piolat et al., 1997).”