Research on multimedia learning has shown that learning is hampered when a multimedia message includes extraneous information that is not relevant for the task, because processing the extraneous information uses up scarce attention and working memory resources. However, eye-tracking research suggests that task experience might be a boundary condition for this negative effect of extraneous information on learning, because people seem to learn to ignore task-irrelevant information over time. We therefore hypothesised that extraneous information might no longer hamper learning when it is present over a series of tasks, giving learners the chance to adapt their study strategy. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments. In experiments 1a/1b, participants learned the definitions of new words (from an artificial language) that denoted actions, with matching pictures (same action), mismatching pictures (another action), or without pictures. Mismatching pictures hampered learning compared with matching pictures. Experiment 2 showed that task experience may indeed be a boundary condition to this negative effect on learning: the initial negative effect was no longer present when learners gained experience with the task. This suggests that learners adapted their study strategy, ignoring the mismatching pictures. That hypothesis was tested in experiment 3, using eye tracking. Results showed that attention to the pictures waned with task experience, and that this decrease was stronger for mismatching than for matching pictures. Our findings demonstrate the importance of investigating multimedia effects over time and in relation to study strategies.

We would like to express our gratitude to Alex van Straaten, Sven Cammeraat, and Tudor Cristea for their help during the data collection. We would also like to thank prof. dr. Rolf Plötzner for providing the materials used in Experiment 3. This research was funded by the Excellence Initiative grant from the Erasmus University Rotterdam awarded to the Educational Psychology section. We also thank the Erasmus Behavioral Lab, especially Marcel Boom, for their continued help in the lab.

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Earlier ecologically motivated studies have revealed substantial individual differences in perceptual learning: Individuals varied in their ability to attune to a specifying variable. A possible source of these individual differences is between-subjects variation in the capacity to benefit from feedback. Although this hypothesis was postulated by Withagen & van Wermeskerken (2009), their experiment could not exclude other factors that might be involved. The aim of the present experiment was to provide a more critical test of their hypothesis. To this end, we trained two groups of participants in length perception by dynamic touch in two different learning environments. In one environment, it was easier for a perceiver to separate the perceptual noise from the error that resulted from the detection of a nonspecifying variable. This separation was more difficult to make in the other learning environment. All of the participants responded to the feedback in the easy environment, but not all of them did in the difficult environment. This indicates that individuals indeed differ in their capacities to benefit from feedback. The implications of these results for recent debates on individual differences are discussed.