Choosing and Reading Online News: How Available Choice Affects Cognitive Processing

A within-subjects experiment explored how the number of online, hyperlinked stories available for individuals to choose from affects cog-nitive processing of a selected story. Participants chose and read un-pleasant online news stories from a Web page containing either 5 or 15 headline/photo hyperlinks. Heart rate data indicated more cognitive re-sources were allocated to reading stories selected from the larger array of hyperlinks. This increased allocation of cognitive resources also led to more accurate story recognition. Results of this study provide insight into information processing of interactive, online news as well as lim-ited suggestions for the design of news Web sites. Giving people the ability to choose from a wide variety of content when they want to see it is a hallmark of today’s interactive media landscape. News/information por-tals, blogs, video-on-demand, and file-sharing galleries all give computer users the freedom to choose content from vast arrays of options, then acquire and view that content with the click of a mouse. To date, researchers have not thoroughly examine