Fischhoff, B. (1977). Perceived informativeness of facts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3(2), 349-358.
There are many tasks in which people are called on to disregard information that they have already processed. Dealing with inadmissible evidence in a courtroom setting, second-guessing the past, and responding to experimental psychologists' debriefing instructions are 3 tasks of this type; in all these cases, people have been found to experience considerable difficulty. The present experiments investigated these difficulties in a general form, using ...