Adult age differences in information foraging in an interactive reading environment.

Abstract

When learning about a single topic in natural reading environments, readers are confronted with multiple sources varying in the type and amount of information. In this situation, readers are free to adaptively respond to the constraints of the environment (e.g., through selection of resources and time allocation for study), but there may be costs of exploring and switching between sources (e.g., disruption of attention, opportunity costs for study). From an ecological perspective, such properties of the environment are expected to influence learning strategies. In the current study, we used a novel reading paradigm to investigate age differences in the effects of information richness (i.e., sentence elaboration) and costs of switching between texts (i.e., time delay) on selection of sources and study time allocation. Consistent with the ecological view, participants progressed from less informative to more informative texts. Also, increased switch cost led to a tendency to allocate more effort to easier materials and to greater persistence in reading, which in turn, led to better memory in both immediate and delayed recall. Older adults showed larger effects of switch cost, such that the age difference in delayed recall was eliminated in the high switch cost condition. Based on an ecological paradigm of reading that affords choice and self-regulation, our study provided evidence for preservation with age in the ability to adapt to changing learning environments so as to improve performance.

Print exposure across the reading life span

“…Overall, print exposure increased between adolescence and old age, which is in line with the results of three previous studies (Choi et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2016;Payne et al, 2014). This result contrasts with two studies that did not find age differences in print exposure between young and older adults (Stanovich et al, 1995;West et al, 1993).…”

“…The extant evidence is inconclusive regarding the increase of print exposure between adolescence and old age. Two studies reported significant differences in the ART between young and older adults (Choi, Lowder, Ferreira, Swaab, & Henderson, 2017;Liu et al, 2016) and one study with 18-to 81-year-olds reported a large correlation between age and print exposure (Payne et al, 2014). By contrast, another study reported no print exposure differences between young and older adults (Stanovich et al, 1995), and a life span study with 18-to 65-year-olds reported a very small correlation between age and print exposure (West, Stanovich, & Mitchell, 1993).…”

Berrypicking and information foraging: Comparison of two theoretical frameworks for studying exploratory search

“…Selecting a particular information source entails the risk that it will produce little or no information and that the time will be wasted. Second, if there is a deadline involved, then there is a chance that sufficient information will not be foraged in time (p. 214) [35]. Nonetheless, despite these risks, information foragers make decisions on which particular patches they select and the order in which they are selected.…”

Loading… loading… The influence of download time on information search

“…The primary goal of the two experiments reported in this paper was to evaluate whether increasing the download time of (simulated) online videos would discourage participants from accessing the content in those videos. Going beyond prior work [25, 26] we varied download times of videos within a given search session. In Experiment 1, we found participants terminated more downloads, and started and finished fewer videos with a 30-second download time than videos with shorter 0- or 2-second download times.…”

“…Extending the work by Dennis and Taylor (2006), we were interested in examining search behaviour as participants encountered content online, but with 1) variable (rather than homogenous) [25–26] access delays in a given search session and 2) the ability to switch between sources during a download. In the present studies we had participants complete a video viewing task.…”