Investigating Trustworthiness and Conflict in Historical Multiple Texts: From Eye-Tracking Data of Source and Content Processing

Abstract

Online reading is one of the sources to acquire knowledge, but learners may encounter conflicting texts during reading. Thus, learners need to distinguish the source's trustworthiness and determine which perspectives to believe. However, previous studies have focused more on the source than on the content and more on science than on history in eye-tracking fields. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how readers perceive conflict and process source and content when reading historical multiple texts with varying degrees of trustworthiness. 11 participants were recruited and presented six historical texts under three different conditions: high-trustworthiness, low-trustworthiness, and trustworthiness-differences. Their eye movement was recorded. The results indicated that the readers rated the low-trustworthiness condition as having more conflict than the others. Additionally, the low-trustworthiness condition had less first-pass reading time on the content than on the source only in the trustworthiness-differences and low-trustworthiness conditions. When reading text with low trustworthiness, the reader spent more first-pass reading time on the source than on the content and spent more rereading time on the content than on the source. These findings have several implications. Firstly, readers were overwhelmed and needed guidance on which information to believe, leading to the perception of more conflict when reading low-trustworthiness conditions. Second, the readers were aware that the source seemed untrustworthy, leading them to decrease reading time to process the following content. After confirming the source's trustworthiness, readers tended to reread the content to resolve the conflict. Lastly, low-trustworthiness sources decreased processing time in the following content, indicating that readers regulate their reading patterns depending on the text's trustworthiness. Overall, this study provides insights into how readers process historical multiple texts with varying degrees of trustworthiness.