122 Understanding Rational Decision Making
mishear the rest of the information in the word problem as they tried to make the information they
heard conform to the wrong schema or problem type.
Even activating the right schema can sometimes lead to problems. After researchers identifi edthe elements of readers’ restaurant script or schema, they asked the readers to read stories about
dining in restaurants and then to recall the stories they read. Readers erroneously recalled and
recognized statements that were not in the stories but that were part of their restaurant schema.^177
Information Acquisition
Information acquisition is another name for search. It is the process by which audiences search
for the information that can fi ll the slots of their activated schema.^178 Because the audience’s acti-
vated schema directs their search, information acquisition is a form of task-driven, as opposed to
stimulus-driven, attention.
The information-acquisition process enables audiences to attend to the information that is relevantto their activated schema by fi ltering out information that is irrelevant to it.^179 Information relevant to
any unactivated schemata is also fi ltered out. Apparently, audiences acquire information for only one
schema at a time when comprehending texts or making decisions.^180 For example, audiences cannot
simultaneously encode information about a home from the perspective of a home buyer and a burglar,
even though both schemata are equally available to them and equally well known.
The interest that audiences have in acquiring new information is determined by their activatedschema. New information per se is neither more interesting nor less interesting than information with
which the audience is already familiar.^181 But audience members do fi nd new information interest-
ing and easy to recall when it fi lls slots in their activated schema.^182 For example, teachers who fi rst
developed a schema for categorizing students’ learning strategies later showed higher levels of interest
in acquiring more information about students’ strategies and achieved better educational outcomes
than teachers who received the same factual information but no schema-inducing framework.^183
In our model information acquisition starts after schema activation. It has two steps: (1) fi llingin schema slots with information that has already been comprehended and identifi ed as relevant to
the schema; and (2) searching for the information that will fi ll the next schema slot.
Brain Regions Activated. Information acquisition, or task-driven attention, involves activa-tion of the area at the top front of the right inferior frontal junction (IFJ), located in the middle
region of the right frontal lobe,^184 and may involve activation of the left IFJ as well (see Figure 3.4 ,
p. 108).^185 Disorders associated with these regions include defi cits in executive functions that are
typical of early stage dementia.
The Process of Filling Schema Slots
The time it takes to fi ll a schema slot with a slot value, as opposed to search for a slot value, varies
with the slot’s importance. A series of studies of readers reading 15 expository texts showed that
readers fi xate longer on words that fi ll important schema slots than on words that fi ll less impor-
tant ones.^186 For example, readers spent more time per word when reading about the purpose of
fl ywheels than when reading about the physical properties of fl ywheels. Similarly, readers of nar-
ratives take more time to read a sentence if the information in the sentence plays a signifi cant role
in the story than if it plays a minor one.^187 Readers also remember words longer when the words
fi ll important schema slots.^188
The order in which readers search for information to fi ll the slots of a schema reveals the slots’relative importance to the reader’s goals for a particular task.^189 Readers can fi ll a slot quite easily if
the slot value is already labeled in the text (e.g., “Exemplars include.. .”). When readers cannot