Learners are often constrained by their available study time, typically having to make a trade-off between depth and breadth of learning. Classic experimental paradigms in memory research treat all items as equally important, but this is unlikely the case in reality. Rather, information varies in importance, and people vary in their ability to…

We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions…

The notion of optimality is often invoked informally in the literature on metacognitive control. We provide a precise formulation of the optimization problem and show that optimal time allocation strategies depend critically on certain characteristics of the learning environment, such as the extent of time pressure, and the nature of the uptake…