Postdictable concepts are those concepts that can be justified after having been seen.[1][2][3][4] Upal labeled a counterintuitive concept as postdictable if the postdiction process is successful making sense of the concept i.e., the reader is successfully able to construct a justification given the reader's background knowledge, level of motivation and interest, and the cognitive resources (including time) available to the reader. According to the context-based model of minimal counterintuiveness, postdictable counterintuitive concepts are minimally counterintuitive and are remembered well. Those counterintuitive concepts that are not postdictable in a given context are considered to be maximally counterintuitive and are not remembered well by people. Thus the concept of a flying elephant is postdictable (and thus minimally counterintuitive) when set up in the context of Operation Dumbo Drop because it can be justified in that context. The concept of a "square triangle that only exists on Wednesdays and eats cats" however does not make any sense and is therefore not postdictable.
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ Upal, M. A. (2005). Role of context in memorability of intuitive and counterintuitive concepts. In B. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.). Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2224–2229). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- ^ Kintsch, W. (1980). Learning from text, levels of comprehension, or: Why would anyone read a story anyway. Poetics, 9, 89–98.
- ^ Upal, M. A. Gonce, L., Tweney, R. and Slone, R. (2007) Contextualizing counterintuitiveness: How context affects comprehension and memorability of counterintuitive concepts, Cognitive Science, 31(3), 415-439.
- ^ Upal, M. A. An Alternative View of the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect, Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 11(2), 194-203.