Read this sentence: After spending a day exploring beautiful sights in the crowded streets of New York, Jane discovered that her wallet was missing. When people who had read this brief story (along with many others) were given a surprise recall test, the word pickpocket was more strongly associated with the story than the word sights, even though the latter was actually in the sentence while the former was not. The rules of associative coherence tell us what happened. The event of a lost wallet could evoke many different causes: the wallet slipped out of a pocket, was left in the restaurant,
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