{"id":13916,"date":"2022-02-22T14:27:21","date_gmt":"2022-02-22T22:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=13916"},"modified":"2022-02-22T14:27:21","modified_gmt":"2022-02-22T22:27:21","slug":"understanding-ci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/22\/understanding-ci\/","title":{"rendered":"How Does Understanding Work? A Look at the Construction-Integration Model of Comprehension"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I discussed John Anderson\u2019s ACT-R theory of cognitive skill acquisition<\/a>. ACT-R is an ambitious theory tackling a big question: how do we learn things? Anderson\u2019s theory makes compelling predictions and has quite a bit of evidence to back it up.<\/p>\n

Yet understanding the mind is like the story of the blind men and the elephant. One touches the tusk and says that elephants are hard and smooth. Another touches the leg and says they\u2019re rough and thick. A third touches the tail and says they\u2019re thin and hairy. What theory you arrive at depends on what you choose to grasp.<\/p>\n

ACT-R was developed using a paradigm of problem-solving, particularly in well-defined domains like algebra or programming. This relatively simple paradigm is then assumed to represent all of the broader, messier kinds of intellectual skills that people apply to real-life situations.<\/p>\n

But what if we take a different paradigm as our starting point?<\/p>\n

In this essay, I take a deeper look at Walter Kintsch\u2019s Construction-Integration (CI) theory. This theory uses the process of understanding text as its starting point for a broader view of cognition. As I\u2019ll show, it both complements and contrasts the ACT-R model we discussed previously.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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How Do We Comprehend What We Read?<\/h2>\n

What is going on right now, in your head, so that you can understand the words I\u2019ve typed?<\/p>\n

At a basic level, we understand that the brain has to convert these black squiggles into letters and words. But what happens next? How do we actually make sense of it? We are pretty good at getting machines to recognize text from a photo. But we\u2019re a lot worse at getting these machines to understand what they read in ways that closely resemble human beings.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason this is so hard is that language is ambiguous. Take the phrase, \u201ctime flies like an arrow.\u201d What does it mean? For most of us, the expression is a metaphor\u2014it evokes an idea of time passing forward in a straight line. Except, taken literally, there are several possible situations this sentence could refer to.<\/p>\n

The joke in linguistics is \u201ctime flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.\u201d<\/p>\n

How, then, do we know when reading that there isn\u2019t a species of fly called the \u201ctime fly,\u201d and they happen to be particularly fond of a kind of projectile?<\/p>\n

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The vague, but correct, answer is that we use our world knowledge to constrain which interpretation is the most reasonable. We merge the literal words of the text with what we already know to effortlessly form a picture of what the sentence means. Walter Kintsch\u2019s Construction-Integration theory is a hypothesis about how we do this.<\/p>\n

Fundamental Concept: Propositions<\/h2>\n

The basic building blocks of Kintsch\u2019s theory are propositions. A proposition is a way of rewriting an English sentence that makes clear a single, literal meaning. Propositions are useful because English sentences can be ambiguous, or they may be arbitrarily complicated (and thus contain many propositions).<\/p>\n

A sentence like \u201cthey are flying planes\u201d could be interpreted as two propositional structures: FLY[THEY, PLANES] or ISA[THEY, FLYING[PLANE]]. The first roughly translates to the idea that there are some people (they) who are piloting (flying) planes. The second is a statement that there are some things (they) which happen to be planes for flying.<\/p>\n

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Think of a proposition as a fundamental building block of meaning. We can even form complex meaning by connecting together a network of these atomic propositions.<\/p>\n

Propositions are a useful tool, but do they have any psychological reality? Kintsch argues that they do:<\/p>\n