Social media tends to use “catchy” headlines to intentionally get people to click news. However, clickbait headlines can erode readers’ trust and devalue news. To combat clickbait, it is necessary to understand how clickbait headlines influence readers’ clicking behavior and attention allocation. In this study, the researchers first collected headlines of news stories that had different amount and duration of media coverage, then identified whether these headlines include forward-reference strategies, and conducted an EEG experiment based on N2b and P3a. The results showed that the clickbait headlines with a forward-reference device attracted more attention resources and induced the involuntary attention allocation more quickly, compared with those without a forward-reference device. Unexpectedly, whether the news stories were top news stories or non-top news stories didn’t significantly influence the attention allocation.

COVID-19 misinformation got a lot of engagement on social media, which has been a big threat to public health and international relations. Therefore, this study designed an accuracy nudge intervention to induce people to discern misinformation and adopted exogenous cues to reinforce their discernment ability. The two interventions were expected to reduce people’s engagement in COVID-19 misinformation. To test the hypothesis, 80 younger adults and 80 older adults completed this experiment. As expected, the accuracy nudge motivated people to judge misinformation to a large extent. Most of the participants (91.3%) voluntarily used the accuracy nudge, which also decreased the sharing of misinformation by 62.7%. While the intervention combining the accuracy nudge and exogenous cues did not work better than any single intervention in reducing misinformation engagement. Besides, older adults tend to like or share articles that just rely on their glance at headlines, which may account for their vulnerability to misinformation.

In order to make AI tools for spam review detection to be more trustworthy, two types of explanation were designed, the Text-AI tool and the Behaviour-AI tool. The Text-AI tool establishes detection criteria based on the textual features of reviews, while the Behaviour-AI tool establishes detection criteria based on the behavioural features of reviewers. The trust of younger (20–26 years) and older (50–78 years) adults in AI tools and the changes in credibility judgments for reviews and overall attitude toward the product made by them based on AI tools’ detection results were measured. We mainly found that: (i) Almost all the older participants reported that they trust AI tools’ prediction, but 48.7% of them would abandon AI when AI’s prediction was different from their own judgment. (ii) Younger adults showed a higher trust in the Behaviour-AI tool than in the Text-AI tool, especially when the AI tool detected more spam reviews than themselves. (iii) Regardless of age and types of explanation, participants perceived AI tools as more competent and benevolent when AI tools outperformed participants by detecting unexpected spam reviews.

Screen mirroring might be a way to improve older adults’ user experience of smart televisions (STVs) through smartphones. To examine this possibility, two experiments were conducted. Experiment I examined older adults’ difficulties of screen mirroring (mirroring smartphone screens to STVs) through five common touch gestures (“Drag,” “Slide,” “Zoom,” “Draw,” and “Handwrite”), in comparison to younger adults. The results indicated that a major problem for older adults is the frequent attention switching between the STV and smartphone screens. Therefore, experiment II explored how to reduce the need of attention switching through the touch gestures (“Tap,” “Slide + Tap,” and “Slide + Release”) and the button sizes (8, 14, and 20 mm) for different input postures. Thirty older adults participated in this experiment and their eye movements were tracked. Four major findings were derived. First, the “Zoom,” “Draw,” and “Handwrite” gestures in screen mirroring were difficult for older adults with a task completion rate lower than 68%. Second, the problem of frequent attention switching between the STV and smartphone was predominant for tapping tasks. Third, the “Slide + Tap” and “Slide + Release” touch gestures helped to reduce attention switching in tapping tasks more than the “Tap” for older adults, while the “Slide + Release” received the worst subjective feedback. Fourth, increasing the button size from 8 mm to 14 mm on smartphones can improve the task completion rate and the task efficiency in screen mirroring when older adults used the one-handed posture to tap.