Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In many ecologically situated cognitive tasks, participants en-gage in self-selection of the particular stimuli they choose toevaluate or test themselves on. This contrasts with a traditionalexperimental approach in which an experimenter has completecontrol over the participant’s experience. Considering thesetwo situations jointly provides an opportunity to understandwhy participants opt in to some stimuli or tasks but not toothers. We present here a Bayesian model of cognitive andmetacognitive processes that uses latent contextual knowledgeto model how learners use knowledge to make opt-in decisions.We leverage the model to describe how performance on self-selected stimuli relates to performance on true experimentaltasks that deny learners the opportunity for self-selection. Weillustrate the utility of the approach with an application to ageneral-knowledge answering task.