Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While learning in a multitext environment increases with therise of electronic environments, little is known about whatmakes learners feel that they should continue learning oralready learn enough from one text. The current study aimedat examining what cues learners use to regulate their effortamong multiple sources in a multitext environment. Bymanipulating the amount of new information and conceptualoverlap across texts within a topic, we created three types oftext environments to generate different trajectories of twocues to perceived learning, new information (measured byrating of perceived new information) and encoding fluency(measured by ratings of reading ease). Results showed thatthe dominant cue to gauge perceived learning was theperceived amount of new information. The study extendedtheories in animal foraging and metacognition, andestablished a novel paradigm to better investigate adultlearning in the wild.