Jennifer Stiegler-Balfour presents research at 2014 Eastern Psychological Association Conference

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jennifer Stiegler-Balfour, Ph.D., recently presented her research examining the impact of individual differences on discourse processing at the 2014 Eastern Psychological Association Conference in Boston.

Her talk, titled “The Role of Contextual Cues in Monitoring Causal Information in Narratives,” outlined how some readers are able to monitor protagonists’ goals and motivations while others are not.

Stiegler-Balfour’s research further showed that the addition of a reinstatement sentence that reduced working memory load and highlighted the most important aspects of the narrative raised comprehension levels of readers.

These results were discussed in terms of the implications that subtle text changes can have on individuals who either have lower reading comprehension skill or experience memory decline due to Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders.
 

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