Access to affordances, development of situation models, and identification of procedural text problems

This experiment tested the effect of access to an object's affordances on the development of an accurate situation model of procedural texts. The 40 participants read two sets of instructions while either doing the task or only reading the text. They then rated each sentence in terms of its difficulty and the type(s) of problem(s) it had (if any), and told how they would fix the problem(s). As predicted, participants who did the task tended to notice improperly ordered sentences, whereas those who only read the text (without seeing the device) tended to focus on grammatical problems. The results were consistent with the indexical hypothesis of Glenberg and Robertson (from their 1999 article in Discourse Processes).