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

References

  1. 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.
  2. Kintsch, W. (1980). Learning from text, levels of comprehension, or: Why would anyone read a story anyway. Poetics, 9, 89–98.
  3. 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.
  4. Upal, M. A. An Alternative View of the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect, Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 11(2), 194-203.
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