Comprehension strategies, worth and credibility monitoring, and evaluations: Cold and hot cognition when experts read professional articles that are important to them

Fifteen active social scientists read self-selected professional-level articles pertinent to their interests and professional activities. Verbal protocols were generated during reading. All readers exhibited a number of comprehension strategies normally associated with sophisticated, self-regulated reading. They also monitored the worth and credibility of the texts they were reading. There was a strong association between such monitoring and salient evaluative reactions of the text. Expert reading is both the cold cognition emphasized in previous information-processing analyses and the hot cognition emphasized by scholars of rhetoric who have studied professionals as they read.