Dynamic assessment of information acquisition effort during interactive search

✍ Scribed by Michael J. Cole; Jacek Gwizdka; Chang Liu; Nicholas J. Belkin

• Book ID: 102946341
• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 529 KB
• Volume: 48
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0044-7870
• DOI: 10.1002/meet.2011.14504801149

✦ Synopsis

We present a method to measure some aspects of cognitive effort by a user while reading during a search session. We measured reading eye movement properties and patterns of eye movement in a user study (n=32) of participants carrying out realistic journalism IR work tasks. The results show the cognitive effort measures correlate positively with the information task characteristics that, by hypothesis, contribute to task difficulty. They also correlate well with participant selfassessed task difficulty. Our methodology can be applied to eye tracking data in any (textual) information setting and used to give dynamic estimates of these aspects of cognitive processing during search.