Independence of question-answering strategy and searched representation.

Because many studies of question answering, recall, and recognition have examined script-based messages, a spurious link between answering strategy and searched representation has emerged: Direct retrieval has been associated with the episodic representation of a discourse or a learned list, whereas plausibility judgment has been associated with general knowledge structures. Evidence of the independence of answering strategy and searched representation is presented. First, previous research and intuition both provide examples of the application of either strategy to either type of representation. Second, there is empirical evidence of the application of either strategy to both message text bases and general knowledge. Third, the effects of factors influencing strategy selection are independent of the type of searched representation. It is concluded that answering strategy is independent of the representation to which it is applied.