A Data–Frame Theory of Sensemaking

Throughout the history of psychology, from its earliest philosophical phase through to modern times, it has always been taken as an empirical fact that humans have a faculty to understand. This has been referred to as judgment, apprehension, apperception, and other processes (cf. Woodworth, 1938) in which meanings are ascribed to things that are perceived or known. Typically, both theory and research focused on how people understand individual simple stimuli (e.g., individual letters, words, colored geometric forms, etc.). During the era of “verbal behavior” and the rise of psycholinguistics from the ashes of behaviorism, a process called “comprehension” became the subject of much inquiry. Again, both theory and research focused on how people understand simple stimuli such as words, sentences, or text passages (cf. Clark & Clark, 1977).