| Abstract | Students are tasked with learning a vast amount of information, and some of that information may be emotional whereas other information may be neutral. Critically, the kind of information that students learn can influence their study decisions and their study decisions can influence their memory. According to the agenda-based regulation theory, students set agendas, or goals that they want to accomplish while studying. There are a number of factors that can influence students¿ agendas (e.g., difficulty of the material, interest in material), which can influence how they regulate their learning. In the present research, I evaluated how people control their learning (via allocation of study time) of emotional and neutral information. Participants self-paced their study of positive, negative, and neutral words (Experiments 1 and 2) or pictures (Experiments 3 and 4). Participants made a judgment of learning for each item and took a free-recall test. For words, self-paced study times were not influenced by valence. By contrast, for pictures, students allocated the most study time to positive pictures, which were also rated as being the most interesting. Thus, when regulating learning of emotional and neutral pictures, students adopted an interest-based agenda, such that they strategically allocated the most study time to the most interesting information. These outcomes contribute to agenda-based regulation theory by demonstrating that students¿ agendas can be influenced by their interest in the to-be-learned material. Moreover, conclusions about students¿ self-regulated learning can be influenced by the kinds of material they have to study as well as the measure used to evaluate their study decisions. |
