ABSTRACT

How does a political text’s complexity – as a crucial characteristic of a text – uniquely affect readers’ political information processing? Based on a metacognitive response framework and extant discussions based on the Heuristic-Systematic Model vs. the Elaboration Likelihood Model, we tested whether a reader’s initial expectation of a message characteristic and stable individual differences intersect with the metacognitive processing fluency experience. Do people recall more information from the news when presented with articles that are more – or less – complex than they expected, or do they recall more information when expectations of article complexity are met? And for whom is this more likely to occur? Our results provide strong support for the notion that objective complexity is indeed the main driver of metacognitive perceptual processing fluency and information recall, while also rending partial support for the role of (in)congruency in this process. The results also showed that individual differences in processing capabilities play a significant role in shaping information recall. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications.

摘要

政治文本的复杂性——作为文本的一个关键特征——如何独特地影响读者的政治信息处理？基于元认知响应框架和基于启发式系统模型与精化似然模型的现有讨论，我们测试了读者对消息特征的初始期望和稳定的个体差异是否与元认知处理流畅性体验相交。当人们看到比预期更复杂或更复杂的文章时，人们是否会从新闻中回忆起更多信息？或者当满足文章复杂性的期望时，他们会回忆更多信息吗？这更可能发生在谁身上？我们的结果为客观复杂性确实是元认知感知处理流畅性和信息回忆的主要驱动力这一观点提供了强有力的支持，同时也部分支持了（不）一致性在这一过程中的作用。结果还表明，处理能力的个体差异在塑造信息回忆方面起着重要作用。最后，我们讨论了理论和实践意义。