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

教育中的一个常见问题是如何以一种有趣和吸引学生的方式设计教学。因此，有趣但不相关的细节，如有趣的事实，轶事，或漫画往往被添加到学习材料。然而，根据现有的多媒体学习研究，人们通常应该避免使用这样的方法：有趣但不相关的细节被称为诱惑性细节，因为它们诱使学生将注意力从学习内容上移开，因此，相关信息的认知加工受损（Harp & Mayer，1998）。这些效应在多大程度上是可概括的，或与现有研究的具体研究情况有多大的联系，有待于本研究项目的研究。为此，本项目的研究首先调查是否只有当学生的诱惑性细节的负面影响出现，往往是在以前的研究中，不指示的诱惑性细节的无关性。第二，本项目的研究通过参考意志行动控制理论（机会成本模型; Kurzban，Duckworth，Kable，& Myers，2013）来研究在什么条件下甚至可以产生诱惑细节的积极影响，以得出具体的假设。特别是，诱人的细节可以通过增加和保持学习过程中的积极影响来增加持久性。这些影响很可能会被发现，特别是当学习情况是劳累和/或高度自我控制，使学生面临过早终止学习。为了验证这些假设，本项目的研究扩展了典型的程序，通过首先将其与意志研究的经典研究设计相结合，并将其应用于不同的背景（实验室研究与在线研究与课堂研究）和样本（大学生与小学生）来调查诱惑细节的影响。改变学习环境既是学习过程中自我控制的一种手段，更一般地说，也是对诱惑细节效应与环境无关程度的一种测试。总而言之，该项目的目标是揭示潜在的诱人的细节效应的过程，并得出更多的差异化建议，在未来的教学环境中使用诱人的细节。

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.