When enough is not enough: Information overload and metacognitive decisions to stop studying information.

People are often exposed to more information than they can actually remember. Despite this frequent form of information overload, little is known about how much information people choose to remember. Using a novel "stop" paradigm, the current research examined whether and how people choose to stop receiving new-possibly overwhelming-information with the intent to maximize memory performance. Participants were presented with a long list of items...