Date of Award

Spring 2007

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Psychology

Degree Name

Master of Arts

First Advisor

Edward J O'Brien

Abstract

The experiments reported in this thesis were designed to investigate factors involved in the reactivation of spatial information. Participants read passages that described a protagonist and a target object in a spatial location. In Experiment 1, naming times demonstrated that the target object was active immediately after reading the introduction whereas the target object was no longer active in memory after reading filler information that did not remention the target object. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to read a cuing sentence immediately following the filler information. The results showed that this cue served to reactivate the target object. In Experiment 3, the protagonist spatially moved away from the previous location. The results indicated that even after the situation model shifted, the cuing sentence still reactivated the target object. The overall pattern of results suggest that contextual cuing rather than spatial information determined accessibility of objects during reading.

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