Human Information Behavior Praxis
It appears that searchers rely primarily on their internal knowledge for evaluating and creating information needs, using search primarily for fact checking and verification. Overall, results indicate that a learning theory may better describe the information searching process than more commonly used paradigms of decision making or problem solving.
[CognitiveOnlineSearching, p.643]
One likely potential approach is that searching is a learning process.
[CognitiveOnlineSearching, p.644]
Concrete, reflective, and active learners appear to be relative homogeneous in their searching behaviors. Therefore, it appears that learning style has limited effect on exhibited differences in searching characteristics, with the exception of Abstract learners.
[CognitiveOnlineSearching, p.657]
There are several important implications of this study, including insights into searching needs, a learning model for information searching that is inferential, and possibly improved identification of needed content. First, the commonly held notion that Web searchers have simple information needs may not be correct. Some of these simple expressions may be indicative of higher-level information needs at the evaluating and creating levels of learning. While these tasks are more difficult, they depend more on the users’ creativity or opinions; therefore, any additional information they need to complete the task is fact finding.
[CognitiveOnlineSearching, p.658]
People search for information for a variety of reasons, and this research investigated categorizing some of these reasons in terms of learning needs. The results from this research suggest one can categorize such searching intentions and that these intentions vary in terms of their cognitive demands.
[CognitiveOnlineSearching, p.658]
Technology is a critical means for facilitating human information behavior, but it is only a means; information is an end, the factor of ultimate interest and value.
[HumanInformationBehavior, p.2]
The problem of language as a barrier is most apparent where specialist studies touch on other fields, for example cognition and problem solving where there is sometimes a reticence to use the methods and language of those other fields of study. More fundamental is the tendency for models to be published but never developed further; yet as we look around different disciplines any model is merely a starting point for wider testing and refinement.
[NonlinearIB, p.2]
Thus, even at a most basic level, humans are well equipped to adapt to their environment by constantly generating, testing, and modifying theories.
[PopperPask, p.772]
Increasingly, intelligent information systems may seek to supplant not only cognitive but also metacognitive activities on the part of the information seeker. They may attempt to perform cognitive functions, for example, query expansion. However, they may also perform functions that, if performed by a human, would require metacognitive abilities. For example, they may adapt their strategic behavior according to their knowledge of a user's information-processing style, and attempt to compensate for known, characteristic weaknesses of such styles, in an attempt to improve performance. Such a philosophy drives the development of intelligent adaptive information systems.
[PopperPask, p.779]
It appears that the number of research articles published in the LIS literature has risen in the past two decades despite the physical science librarians’ apparent ambivalence toward their utility in daily practice.
[ScientistLibsISBehavior, p.243]
It is apparent that for physical science librarians, experiences and opinions of colleagues and patrons are of critical importance to their practice and that peer review and citation counts do not necessarily dictate relevance.
[ScientistLibsISBehavior, p.245]
Separating the question of how users prefer to search for information (question 20) from how they wish to read it (question 21) is important. The two issues are often confounded in studies that address both activities in one question. The typical result is that users indicated a preference for print but stated in their comments that they liked finding articles electronically but preferred reading them in print journals due to the lower quality of print copies made from electronic journal articles.
[ScientistsISBehavior, p.2212]
As the number of journals and available scholarly resources continues to increase, researchers are increasingly requesting metasearch tools that search across all resources for initial discovery searching. This is evidenced by the increasing popularity of tools like Google Scholar. Thus, the type of search interface researchers prefer is becoming an important question today. There is growing evidence that both novice and experienced searchers are increasingly using simple single text box search interfaces such as those provided by search engines like Google (http://google.com).
[ScientistsISBehavior, p.2214]
Had the wording of the question focused on the style of type of interface, rather than naming specific tools, the gap between a metasearch portal (e.g., Google) and a metaindex (e.g., the library) may have been wider. Many comments in the survey indicated a strong preference for a single “meta” search tool where the user could enter a single search string that would result in all content in all resource collections being searched, as opposed to manually identifying resource collections and individually searching them.
[ScientistsISBehavior, p.2214]
Researchers are on their way to building collections of electronic articles in the same way they have collected print copies of articles in the past. They also annotate their electronic articles and organize them in bibliographic databases as they do for print collections.
[ScientistsISBehavior, p.2214]
A basic precondition for comprehension is that a model does not overwhelm a reader’s working memory.
[VisualProcessModelReview, p.43]
While it is difficult to change a process model’s intrinsic cognitive load without changing the behavior and content of the process being modeled, the visual presentation can be changed and can have a significant impact on cognitive load without changing the modeled process.
[VisualProcessModelReview, p.43]
Innovative design artifacts as new visualizations, layout, and labeling strategies become subject to empirical evaluation. Thus, the ongoing research on the comprehension of process models complements design-oriented research in process modeling with behavioral science and ensures its effectiveness.
[VisualProcessModelReview, p.60]
The “objective” measurement method of comprehension used predominantly in the extant empirical studies is the multiple-choice comprehension task. Low comprehension scores offer hints about the factors that might cause the failure of human information-acquiring behavior when people use process models. By constructing comprehension tasks, researchers define participants’ information needs that the researchers see as representative of the real-life use of process models and observe whether these needs are satisfied. Comprehension tasks determine and shape how well users take up information from a process model.
[VisualProcessModelReview, p.61]
Neuroimaging tools that measure brain activation (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, EEG)) could be used to measure process model comprehension more objectively and in a more fine-grained way than can the rating scales and multiple-choice tasks that many comprehension studies currently use.
[VisualProcessModelReview, p.61]
Process modeling is at the core of designing information systems, so the article sheds light on an important facet of information-use behavior in the IS discipline: how the information in process models is incorporated into readers’ existing knowledge.
[VisualProcessModelReview, p.63]
