Because humans have limited resources and capacities to digest and comprehend the unprecedented amount of information bombarding today’s world, human attention is a scarce resource and the problem of information overload is becoming increasingly serious. In this study we aim to contribute to an understanding of how humans make decisions about the value of complex sources of information, specifically in the context of online scholarly platforms, online news, and social media. We thus use almost 5000 research-based VoxEU texts, together with the corresponding authors’ characteristics, to test whether, as an evolutionary approach would suggest, author success, skills, and prestige serve as strong cues in readers’ attentional decisions, by analyzing reading, sharing, and searching behaviors. In addition to finding strong support for this assumption, we also show that readers respond to such visual cues as article title, number of words in the abstract, and/or text content, with a clear favoring of figures over tables.

由于人类的资源和能力有限，无法消化和理解当今世界上空前的信息轰炸，因此人类的注意力是一种稀缺资源，信息过载问题变得越来越严重。在这项研究中，我们旨在帮助人们理解复杂的信息资源的价值，特别是在在线学术平台，在线新闻和社交媒体的背景下，人们如何做出决策。因此，我们使用了将近5000种基于研究的VoxEU文本以及相应作者的特征，通过分析阅读来测试作者的成功，技能和威信是否可以作为进化论方法暗示读者的注意力决定的有力提示，以此作为进化论的方法，共享和搜索行为。除了为该假设寻求有力的支持外，