When enough is not enough: Information overload and metacognitive decisions to stop studying information.

Abstract

People are often exposed to more information than they can actually remember. Despite this frequent form of information overload, little is known about how much information people choose to remember. Using a novel “stop” paradigm, the current research examined whether and how people choose to stop receiving new—possibly overwhelming—information with the intent to maximize memory performance. Participants were presented with a long list of items and were rewarded for the number of correctly remembered words in a following free recall test. Critically, participants in a stop condition were provided with the option to stop the presentation of the remaining words at any time during the list, whereas participants in a control condition were presented with all items. Across five experiments, we found that participants tended to stop the presentation of the items to maximize the number of recalled items, but this decision ironically led to decreased memory performance relative to the control group. This pattern was consistent even after controlling for possible confounding factors (e.g., task demands). The results indicated a general, false belief that we can remember a larger number of items if we restrict the quantity of learning materials. These findings suggest people have an incomplete understanding of how we remember excessive amounts of information.

Clinical Orthopaedic Teaching programme for Students (COTS)

“…Studies have shown that provision of superfluous information reduces one’s learning ability, leading to students forgetting key basics required for clinical examinations. 30 Further, where sessions led by senior clinicians are less exam orientated and cover content rarely examined in OSCE assessments, this study demonstrates that this novel NPT model offers a better representation of content encountered during summative examinations. 31…”

Process Account of Curiosity and Interest: A Reward-Learning Perspective

“…Even in real learning contexts, however, students may sometimes stop learning because they, often falsely, believe that they have mastered the materials, even if they actually have not (e.g., students may feel that they understand perfectly how to solve quadratic equations when they are presented with the formula but they actually do not understand the logic behind it). In fact, literature in metacognition has repeatedly shown that learners are inaccurate and optimistic about their mastery of learning materials (e.g., learning foreign words), often terminating their learning behavior prematurely (e.g., Kornell and Bjork 2008;Murayama et al 2016).…”

Development of Interest and Role of Choice During Sequential Knowledge Acquisition

“…That is, we need to make a choice on the information we want to acquire. In the context of school learning, we are often required to regulate our learning by selecting learning materials out of our own choice and deciding the amount of time to work on specific learning materials (Murayama, Blake, et al, 2016).…”