Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we investigated the production of self-adaptors by explainees (N = 53) while listening about novel and repeated topics conveyed by explainers (N = 20) during board game explanations. Based on previous research linking self-adaptors to increased cognitive load and non-understanding in novel stimuli, we hypothesized that self-adaptors would occur more frequently during novel than repeated topics. To add granularity to topic repetition frequency, we considered topics that repeated once, twice, or three or more times. Contrary to our prediction, self-adaptors occurred significantly more often during topics repeated two or more times than during novel topics. This suggested that frequent topic repetitions could be associated with increased cognitive load, consistent with prior research linking self-adaptors to non-understanding. Further, we tested whether explainees' self-adaptors differed by topic initiator. Similar distributions of explainees' self-adaptors across topics initiated by themselves or the explainers indicated no effect compared to topic repetitions.