How to allocate study time is an important decision-making problem learners face. Research on this problem can help improve the learning performance of learners and provide guidance for teaching activities. This research aimed to explore the potential of anchors (prior information that may influence individual decision-making and judgment under uncertainty) as clues for study time allocation and examine the effectiveness of study time allocation under the influence of anchors. Sixty-two Chinese university students (M_age = 21.21, SD = 1.74; 44 females) studied 20 word pairs under self-paced learning instructions. These instructions either set a high anchor (i.e., the typical participant spent 15 s learning each pair) or a low anchor (i.e., the typical participant spent 5 s learning each pair) for study time. After a brief distraction phase, participants took a cued recall test. The results showed that the higher the anchor value, the longer the corresponding study time, and the longer the study time, the better the memory performance. These results reveal that there is both an anchoring effect and a labor-and-gain effect in self-paced study time allocation. This study extends the range of observable anchoring effects and provides important information on allocating study time effectively.

When allocating study time for the English sections of the National College Entrance Examination or the Postgraduate Entrance Examination, learners often encounter value-test likelihood trade-offs, where questions of similar difficulty may have different points and different likelihoods of being tested. This research explored how individuals allocated study time and whether this process exhibited bounded rationality by examining the risky choice framing effects in study time allocation. The research set up two types of items: 1-point items with a 90% likelihood and 9-point items with a 10% likelihood. Each type of item had the same test likelihood but was expressed in different framings. For the 90% likelihood items, the test framing emphasized that they had a 90% likelihood of being tested. Meanwhile, the non-test framing emphasized that they had a 10% likelihood of not being tested. A total of 41 college students participated in the study, and they were allowed to self-regulate their study time for each type of item. The results showed that learners’ study time allocation differed under the two equivalent framings. This indicates that the process of study time allocation is not completely rational, but is rather boundedly rational, which is inconsistent with the expected utility theory.