Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Magalí Ayelén Martínez | Email: martinezmagali@psi.uba.ar
Magalí Ayelén Martínez1°2°, Giuliana Fraternale1°, Gaston Saux2°3°, Debora Burin1°2°
1° Instituto de Investigaciones, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Buenos Aires
2° CONICET
3° Centro de Investigaciones en Psicología y Psicopedagogía (CIPP), Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina
Reading literacy on the Internet involves evaluating source trustworthiness. Theoretical models have associated this ability with individual psycholinguistic and executive differences, but empirical evidence is inconsistent. We studied the association between working memory capacity (WM), vocabulary, and text comprehension with performance on a web page evaluation task in high school students. Participants were 76 second- and third-year students (mean age = 14.37 SD = 0.69), who completed the Letter Number Sequencing test (WM), the BAIRES test (Vocabulary), the TLC-II battery Informational Text screening (Text Comprehension), and an online source rating task (i.e., assessing the trustworthiness of short descriptions of links of varying quality). Linear mixed models with WM, Vocabulary, and Text Comprehension as fixed predictors and Participant and Item as random factors, and good and bad quality sources ratings as dependent variables, indicated that these variables did not predict scores assigned to bad quality links, ps > .107. In contrast, Text Comprehension positively predicted scores for good quality links, β = 0.10, CI95% = [0.01, 0.19], p = .029, but the rest of the predictors were not significant, ps > .053. These results suggest a link between comprehending text and evaluating online sources, conditional on the trustworthiness (high or low) assigned to the source.