Text Comprehension and Memory Research

When a reader reads a text, an "understanding" of the text is created in the reader's mind. It is convenient to introduce the technical term "situation model" in order to refer to this understanding of a text which is created in the mind of a reader. The process of constructing a situation model is called the "comprehension process", while operations such as "text recall", "text summarization", and "text question-answering" generate scientifically observable events as a by-product of the interactions of the situation model and other knowledge structures in the reader's mind.

http://www.utdallas.edu/~golden/TextComp.html