Boundary conditions of the seductive details effect: An integrative analysis of cognitive and volitional processes.

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A common question in education is how to design instruction in a way that it is interesting and catching for students. As a result, interesting but irrelevant details such as fun-facts, anecdotes, or comics are often added to study materials. Based on existing research in multimedia learning, however, one should generally refrain from using such methods: Interesting but irrelevant details are termed seductive details, because they seduce students to draw their attention away from the learning contents, and hence, cognitive processing of pertinent information is impaired (Harp & Mayer, 1998). To what degree these effects are generalizable or bound to the specifics of the study situations of existing research, is subject to the present research project. To this end, the studies of this project first investigate whether negative effects of seductive details appear only when students are, as often the case in previous research, not instructed about the irrelevance of seductive details. Second, the studies of this project investigate under which conditions even positive effects of seductive details may occur by referring to theories on volitional action control (opportunity cost model; Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, 2013) to derive specific hypotheses. In particular, seductive details may increase persistence by increasing and maintaining positive affect during learning. These effects are likely to be found especially when the study situation is tiring and/or highly self-controlled so that students are endangered to terminate studying prematurely. To test these hypotheses, the studies of this project extend the typical procedure to investigate effects of seductive details by first combining it with a classical study design from volition research, and by applying it to different contexts (lab study vs. online study vs. classroom study) and samples (university students vs. school pupils). Changing the study context serves both as a manipulation of self-control during learning and, more generally, as a test of how context-independent the seductive details effect is. Taken together, the goal of the project is both to uncover the processes underlying the seductive details effect and to derive more differentiated recommendations concerning the use of seductive details in instructional settings in the future.