Difficulties in Updating Mental Representations During Reading News Reports

In news, understanding previously stored knowledge is of crucial importance: One can fully understand news only if one can accurately recall and use information from previously read news reports. This is how situation models, the representations of what the text is about, develop and get updated (see Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). But unfortunately, in practice this activation and updating process does not operate as smoothly as the theory suggests it might (Findahl & Höijer, 1981; Larsen, 1983). The two studies presented in this chapter examine this updating process.