ABSTRACT
Knowledge activation in discourse comprehension is uncannily accurate. As long as we stay on a familiar topic, the appropriate background knowledge that we need to interpret what we hear or read comes to us readily and without apparent effort. Even more amazing is what does not come to us: In each situation, there are numerous associated bits of information that are useless in this particular context and that could distract us—but somehow we manage not to think of these, we manage not to be swamped by this flood of intruding irrelevancies.
