Schema-Consistent and Schema-Inconsistent Information

Abstract

Processing effort for schema-consistent, inconsistent, and neutral information was assessed by a secondary task technique. Schema-consistent and inconsistent information received similar processing effort, and both of these received greater effort than schema-irrelevant (neutral) information. These results suggest that the amount of cognitive effort in processing a sentence is dependent on the relevance of the sentence to a particular schema, and not on whether or not it fits the schema.