What you read vs. what you know

To comprehend texts readers build mental representations. To establish coherence and protect these representations against inaccuracies readers routinely monitor and validate textual information against two main informational sources –what they just read (the text itself) and what they know (their background knowledge). This dissertation focuses on validation processes in the context of reading comprehension. Texts today vary in accuracy and trustworthiness. To better understand how readers validate (written) materials against various sources of information, the experimental studies in this dissertation employed different research methods to examine the (neuro)cognitive architecture of the processes involved in validating against prior text (i.e., text-based validation) and validating against background knowledge (i.e., knowledge-based validation) and how these processes affect readers;’ memory for text information.Results illustrate that readers validate incoming information against these two sources in dissociable, (partially) interactive, text-based and knowledge-based validation processes. Moreover, these processes seem to protect readers’ memory against inaccuracies or incongruencies. These observations deepen our understanding of validation processes, provide starting points for investigations of people’s susceptibility to false information and how inaccurate knowledge can be revised and provide insight into the complex interplay between recently acquired knowledge from the text itself and background knowledge in constructing meaning from language.