2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Study on information seeking on WWW by cognitive psychological methods
| Project/Area Number |
18500199
|
|---|
| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
|
| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
|---|
| Section | 一般 |
|---|
| Research Field |
Cognitive science
|
|---|
| Research Institution | University of Tsukuba |
|---|
Principal Investigator |
MORITA Hiromi University of Tsukuba, Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies, Assistant Professor (00359580)
|
|---|
| Project Period (FY) |
2006 – 2007
|
| Keywords | cognitive science / IT / world wide web / information seeking / attention / change blindness |
|---|
| Research Abstract |
In the age of computer network as today, to seek and to make full use of information on the WWW effectively and efficiently is very important for everyone. Thus, the final goal of the study is to make the educational program for acquiring information seeking skill. The purpose of the present study is to examine how people seek information on the WWW and to search for the possibility of improving seeking.
First, we investigated where on the web pages the users direct their attention to, using top pages of practical websites. We applied the well-known cognitive psychological phenomenon, the change blindness, in which observers can be aware of changes where they direct attention to, but cannot detect changes where they do not direct attention to. The results showed that the users tend to direct attention to the site ID and the sections first, main contents next, and sub contents finally, suggesting that users tend to attend navigational components rather than contents.
Nest, we examined the browsing of the same website repeatedly and showed that the time required to find information become shorter as users repeat seeking information in the same category. The experiment examining the relation between the improvement of seeking and the learning of site architecture showed that the participants to the experiment learned site architecture (here, site architecture means pages and link path to that page from the top page) during performing information seeking tasks as correctly as the participants who tried to learn site architecture during the same time. Moreover, there was a correlation between the performance of following information seeking tasks and the number of pages remembered correctly with their link paths.
These results suggest that users tend to direct attention to the navigation components and information seeking might be improved by concerning site architecture.
|
Research Products
(4 results)
