Effects Of Interruption And Types Of Searching Tasks On Web Information Searching

As to Internet users, search engine is one of the most frequently used tools. Understanding the characteristics of online search behavior and the mental model of information searching can improve information searching efficiency on Web and can provide psychological foundation for user-centered designing of searching engine products. This research contains two experiments: experiment one is to explore the effects of different stages and types of interruption on exploratory search; experiment two is to explore the effects of different types of searching task and interruption on information searching. By arranging different types of interruption task (memory interruption or reasoning interruption) in the process of web information search, this research examined the searching performance and subjective evaluation to find out the differences among different phases in cognitive activities.Experiment one used 2(phase of interrupt ion, 60s and 300s)×2(types of interruption, reasoning interruption and memory interruption) within-subjects design. The results showed that when the interruption appeared at 60s, the memory interruption' s effect is more strong on search completion time; while when the interruption appeared at 300s, reasoning interruption' s effects is more strong. This result suggests that in initial stages subjects mostly used memory resource to read, remember certain contents; and in middle-later stages advanced cognitive activities such as reasoning, decision-making and so forth was used to understanding, evaluating, selecting the results to form answer representation. Meanwhile, the subjective evaluation measures and emotion condition were consistent with the result of the performance to some extent.Experiment two used 2(types of information searching tasks, exploratory search and fact search)×3 (types of interruption, no interruption, reasoning interruption and memory interruption) within-subjects design. The results showed that there was no significant differences between time spend on completing exploratory search and fact search under the condition without interruption; when reasoning interruption happened, exploratory search had taken more time; and when memory interruption happened, fact searching had taken more time. This result suggests that exploratory search would require more high-level cognitive activities, such as reasoning, decision making and so forth. Once these cognitive activities were interrupted, recovery time would be necessary. Since there were no significant differences under the memory interruption, it proves that two types of search task demand similar memory resource. But the subjective evaluation measures were to some extent not consistent with the result of the performance.