Ego-depletion Beliefs Can Impact Allocation Of Study Time

Flavell proposed the concept of metacognition.Since then,psychologists have done a lot of research in this field.For a long time,metacognition has been a favorite of researchers because of its importance in guiding learners to learn effectively.As an important index of metacognitive control,study time allocation refers to the behavior of learner to allocate time to different learning tasks,the process of planning and executing in learning activities.In addition to these findings,however,this study found that ego-depletion also had an impact on the allocation of learning time.There were two experiments.Experiment 1a investigated the effect of ego-depletion and item difficulty on study time allocation.The ego-depletion and item difficulty were the ’independent variables.Besides,ego-depletion is the between-subjects variable and the item difficulty is the within-subject variable.The dependent variables were self-paced study time,item selection and recall performance.It was found that ego-depletion had an effect on the study time allocation.The self-paced study time of the depleting group was significantly higher than that of the non-depleting group.But the ego-depletion did not affect the item selection and recall performance.Experiment 1b investigated the effect of ego-depletion and item difficulty on the study time allocation under the condition of fixed pace.The ego-depletion and item difficulty were the independent variables.Besides,ego-depletion was the between-subjects variable and the item difficulty was the within-subject variable.The dependent variables were item selection and recall performance.The results showed that the difficulty of the item affected item selection under the condition of fixed pace.The effect of ego-depletion on recall performance is still not significant.Experiment 2a and 2b investigated the effect of ego-depletion,ego-depletion belief and item difficulty on study time allocation.The independent variables of the experiment were ego-depletion,ego-depletion belief and item difficulty,in which ego-depletion and ego-depletion belief were the between-subjects variables and the item difficulty was the within-subject variable.The dependent variables were self-paced study time,item selection and recall performance.The results of experiment 2a and 2b showed that ego-depletion and ego-depletion beliefs affected the study time allocation.Regardless of the item difficulty,the reverse effect of ego-depletion occurred only in the low score of the depleting group.That meant participants with low score had significantly higher self-paced study time than those with high score,and significantly higher than those in the non-depleting group.For the recall performance of study time allocation task,the main effect of ego-depletion belief was significant,and the recall performance of those who scored low were significantly higher than that of those who scored high.The main findings of this study were as follows:(1)Ego-depletion had an impact on the self-paced study time of learner;the self-paced study time of the depleting group was significantly higher than that of the non-depleting group,resulting in a reverse ego-depletion effect;(2)Ego-depletion beliefs had an impact on the self-paced learning time of learner,and the ego-depletion effect can be reversed only if the ego-depletion belief score is low;(3)Ego-depletion did not affect the learner’s recall performance,but ego-depletion beliefs had an impact on the learner’s recall performance.