A natural inquiry into the national enquirer: Self?induced versus task?induced reading comprehension?

Abstract

This study explores what information is selected and acquired when readers genuinely want to read textual material. College students read sheets from the National Enquirer news magazine in both Self‐induced and Task‐induced reading conditions. In Self‐induced conditions they read the new sheets voluntarily and did not expect to be tested on the contents. In Task‐induced conditions the students knew they were in an experiment that would assess memory for the material they read. In the Self‐induced reading condition the subjects tended to select articles on familiar topics and they extracted more active, narrative code than static descriptions. In contrast, article selection was not guided by familiarity and there was no “narrative bias” in Task‐induced reading conditions. The differences in information extraction between Self‐induced and Task‐induced reading conditions suggest that it is important to examine knowledge acquisition and text comprehension in ecologically valid reading conditions.