New issue of the Journal of Discourse Processes features article co-authored by Jennifer Stiegler-Balfour

Jennifer Stiegler-Balfour, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the psychology department, co-authored an article in the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Discourse Processes. The article entitled “Does the certainty of information influence the updating process? Evidence from the reading of news articles” examines the ease with which readers can update their mental representation of text once information has become outdated. Reading times and recall data collected as part of the study showed that once the cause of an event has been evoked - regardless of whether the cause was based on facts or speculations - the updating process required extra processing time to incorporate the new and more definite cause. The findings are discussed in terms of implications for presenting speculative information in the new media. The full citation for the article is: Blanc, N., Stiegler-Balfour, J. J., & O’Brien, E. J. (2011). Does the certainty of information influence the updating process? Evidence from the reading of news articles. Discourse Processes, 48(6), 387-403.

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