Individual Inferences in Web-Based Information Environments: How Cognitive Processing Fluency, Information Access, Active Search Behaviors, and Task Competency Affect Metacognitive and Task Judgments

ABSTRACT Online information repositories increasingly serve as memory aids in people’s lives. Access to such information stores, however, can result in false perceived equivalencies between web-based information and personal knowledge, which can in turn influence judgments of oneself, of information search tasks, and of the Internet itself. Cognitive processing fluency, access to reliable web-based information, and actively searching for information are shown in a series of experiments to be associated with judgments related to metacognition and task performance. In the context of online information repositories accessed via web search activities, people are shown to (a) overemphasize the degree to which they find the web to be a ready source of relevant information, (b) overestimate their future task performance and the ease of tasks, and (c) inflate their own perceived cognitive and memory abilities. Results also show that those who are least competent in task completion overestimate their relative performance, whereas the most competent underestimate theirs, and that the availability of web-based information can inflate people’s estimated performance, particularly among the more competent. Collectively, three interrelated studies add considerable new insight regarding the impacts of near-ubiquitous access to contemporary information-saturated environments.