College undergraduates read a story about two boys playing hooky from school from the perspective of either a burglar or a person interested in buying a home. After recalling the story once, subjects were directed to shift perspectives and then recall the story again. In two experiments, subjects produced on the second recall significantly more…

When 77 college students were asked a certain type of question after every four pages of a 48-page oceanography text that they were reading, it was found that the text information relevant to questions was learned better than text information irrelevant to questions. Furthermore, reading times and probe reaction times on a secondary task were…

In this study, 30 male college students from two weightlifting classes and 30 female college students enrolled in an educational psychology course designed specifically for music education majors were asked to read two ambiguous passages, each of which could be interpreted in two different ways. The first passage could be perceived as describing…

Subjects read narratives about a meal at a fine restaurant or a trip to a supermarket. The same 18 items of food, attributed to the same characters, were mentioned in the same order in the two stories. As predicted from current formulations of schema theory, foods from categories determined to be part of most people's restaurant schemata were…