Will Time Matter with Cognitive Load and Retention in Online News Consumption?

Abstract

The production and consumption of online news are usually under a bursty temporal pattern. However, little is known about the psychological and cognitive impacts of such bursty consumption of online news. The study employs a 2 (filled-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval burstiness) mixed design experiment to examine how temporal characteristics in online news consumption influence audiences’ cognition and retention. Specifically, three temporal characteristics in online news consumption—filled-interval length, empty-interval length, and empty-interval burstiness—are controlled in the experiment. We instructed fifty-two participants to read a sequence of health-related news posts under various temporal settings while tracking their eye movements. The results showed that (1) empty-interval length increased retention, (2) empty-interval burstiness increased retention but did not have a main effect on cognitive load, and (3) filled-interval length, empty-interval length, and burstiness jointly influence cognitive overload and retention level. The study highlights the holistic perspective in considering the information exposure effect, thus revealing the complex relationship between temporal information characteristics and cognitive reactions and offering empirical suggestions to improve information system design.

Keywords:

• News consumption
• information flow
• burstiness
• temporal patterns
• information overload
• eye-tracking

Disclosure Statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant [19ZDA324]; the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR, China [CityU PDFS2021-1H10, GRF 11505119]; City University of Hong Kong Strategic Research Grant [SRG 7005828]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [011014370119]; the Pre-Research Project of School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing university [2021YYA02].