Predictive Inference Activation

Abstract

Predictive inferences are anticipations of what could happen next in the text we are reading. These inferences seem to be activated during reading, but a delay is necessary for their construction. To determine the length of this delay, we first used a classical word-naming task. In the second experiment, we used a Stroop-like task to verify that inference activation was not due to strategies applied during the naming task. The results show that predictive inferences are naturally activated during text reading, after approximately 1 s.