While learning in a multitext environment increases with therise of electronic environments, little is known about whatmakes learners feel that they should continue learning oralready learn enough from one text. The current study aimedat examining what cues learners use to regulate their effortamong multiple sources in a multitext environment. Bymanipulating the amount of new information and conceptualoverlap across texts within a topic, we created three types oftext environments to generate different trajectories of twocues to perceived learning, new information (measured byrating of perceived new information) and encoding fluency(measured by ratings of reading ease). Results showed thatthe dominant cue to gauge perceived learning was theperceived amount of new information. The study extendedtheories in animal foraging and metacognition, andestablished a novel paradigm to better investigate adultlearning in the wild.

Past research often found that older adults searched less in terms of browsing and generating keywords; few studies examined the processes and underlying mechanism that caused the age-related reduction on search. In the current study, 20 younger and older adults performed ill-defined search tasks with a search box we implemented. In addition to the age differences in the quantities of search, results showed that there were qualitative age differences in allocating resources to exploration and exploitation across tasks varying in difficulties. Older adults were found to do more exploitation within one information cluster as defined by the keywords than younger adults. There was also age difference in the ways to reformulate keywords, that older doing more total changes in keywords and younger doing more partial changes in terms of narrowing or broadening the search. The links between search processes and the age differences in cognitive profiles were also discussed.

Understanding and acting on online health information is increasingly a pre-requisite for patient self-care. Therefore, inadequate health literacy is a barrier to self-care among older adults with chronic illness. The goal of our study was to improve older adults’ comprehension of online health information. We extracted typical health texts from multiple credible health websites, and systematically improved the texts in terms of, content, language, organization and design. Results showed that older adults better understood the revised passages than the typical ones, in terms of their reading efficiency (time per unit of information uptake). Intervention benefits were greater for older adults with more domainspecific health knowledge, suggesting that knowledge facilitated the comprehension of health information in the revised texts. Implications for promoting older adults’ comprehension of health information are discussed.