Abstract
Using cognitive models of web-navigation to generate support has
long been a topic of research. In this paper, we address two lim-
itations in this area. First, these models have so far been used to
generate support for navigation within a website and not for inter-
action with a search engine. Second, very few studies have looked
at the usefulness of such model-generated support for older adults
who are known to be less efficient than younger adults. An exper-
iment with 24 younger and 24 older adults on six simple and six
difficult information search tasks was conducted. Results showed
that the semantic relevance of queries showed a decreasing trend
across reformulations for older adults and remained constant for
younger adults, indicating that as older adults reformulated, they
produced queries that were further away from the target information,
which could be the reason for their lower efficiency. Based on these
outcomes, two types of model-generated support mechanisms for
interaction with a search engine are proposed, one which visually
highlights the most relevant search result given a query and the other
which monitors the average semantic relevance of search results for
a given query and warns the user if it falls below a threshold.
long been a topic of research. In this paper, we address two lim-
itations in this area. First, these models have so far been used to
generate support for navigation within a website and not for inter-
action with a search engine. Second, very few studies have looked
at the usefulness of such model-generated support for older adults
who are known to be less efficient than younger adults. An exper-
iment with 24 younger and 24 older adults on six simple and six
difficult information search tasks was conducted. Results showed
that the semantic relevance of queries showed a decreasing trend
across reformulations for older adults and remained constant for
younger adults, indicating that as older adults reformulated, they
produced queries that were further away from the target information,
which could be the reason for their lower efficiency. Based on these
outcomes, two types of model-generated support mechanisms for
interaction with a search engine are proposed, one which visually
highlights the most relevant search result given a query and the other
which monitors the average semantic relevance of search results for
a given query and warns the user if it falls below a threshold.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 34th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics ECCE 2016 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Simulation, visualisation and digital technologies |
| Place of Publication | Nottingham |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-4503-4244-5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2016 |
Keywords
- Aging
- Cognitive model
- Support
- Information Search