Validation Processes and Reading Instructions: Is Validation Against Background Knowledge and Prior Text Influenced by Reading Instructions?

Prior work on the influence of reading goals on comprehension processes and products involved examinations of how people read and learn valid, true information, but in daily life people frequently encounter false or incongruent information. Therefore, we investigated whether and how reading instructions affect the processing of texts containing false or incongruent information and readers subsequent memory for those texts. We used a self-paced sentence-by-sentence contradiction paradigm with texts that varied systematically in (in)congruency with prior text information and (in)accuracy with readers’ world-knowledge. Participants were instructed to evaluate either the accuracy (fact-checking) or the congruency of text information (coherence-checking). Memory for text information was assessed the next day. Results show different patterns of online and offline results that are difficult to reconcile. Instructions influence knowledge-based and text-based validation processes, but they did not differentially affect readers’ memory for incongruent and false targets. This suggests that the processing differences elicited by the instructions did not affect readers memory for incongruent or false target information.