Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In our cognitive-motivational process model (Vollmeyer & Rheinberg, in press) we assumed that motivational factors have an impact on how people learn about a task and how well they can perform it. Many motivation theories (if not all) have such assumptions in common. Our approach emphasizes four task specific motivational factors: mastery confidence, incompetence fear, interest, and challenge. We investigated how these motivational factors influence the learning outcome through mediators. Our framework proposes that the motivational state and the strategy systematicity could mediate motivational effects on learning. Path analysis supported this assumption in two studies.