The author summarizes his evolving interests from conditioning studies within a behaviorist orientation, thence to human memory, knowledge representation, and narrative understanding and memory. Arguing that the study of skilled reading provides a microcosm for revealing cognitive processes, he illustrates this by reviewing his research on the use of spatial priming to investigate readers' on-line updating of their situational models of texts. Conceptual entities close to the reader's focus of attention within the model are readily retrieved. Retrieval speed from memory declines with the probed object's distance from the current focus and decays with time elapsed in the narrative since the item was last in focus. The focus effect varies with the character's perspective, his status in the story, his active goals, and other factors. The results are accommodated within an associative network model distinguishing just-read sentences in short-term memory from activated portions of long-term memory structures to which they refer.

中文翻译：

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认知心理学家的演变：从简单行为到复杂心理行为的旅程。

作者总结了他不断发展的兴趣，包括从行为主义取向的条件研究，人类记忆，知识表示以及叙事理解和记忆的发展。他认为对熟练阅读的研究为揭示认知过程提供了一个缩影，他通过回顾他关于使用空间引发法的研究来说明这一点，以研究读者对他们的文本情境模型的在线更新。可以很容易地检索到模型中与读者关注的焦点接近的概念实体。从内存中检索的速度随着所探测对象与当前焦点的距离而降低，并且随着自该项目最后一次聚焦以来在叙述中经过的时间而下降。焦点效果随角色的视角，故事中的角色，活跃的目标以及其他因素而变化。