Age and cognitive ability as predictors of computerized information retrieval

Westerman, S. J.; Davies, D. R.; Glendon, A. Ian; Stammers, R. B.; Matthews, Gerald

doi:10.1080/01449299508914650

Cited by 50 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…It has been shown that users with high levels of long-term memory navigate through systems less efficiently than those with low long-term memory. This is not the direction that results would be expected to conform with, however statistical significance occurs nonetheless [Westerman et al 1995]. It could be possible that the reason for this surrounds an additional factor that is affecting the overall outcome as this result seems very unintuitive.…”

Section: Long Term Storage and Retrievalmentioning

confidence: 57%

An Analysis of Age, Technology Usage, and Cognitive Characteristics Within Information Retrieval Tasks

Crabb

Hanson

2016

ACM Trans. Access. Comput.

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This work presents two studies that aim to discover whether age can be used as a suitable metric for distinguishing performance between individuals or if other factors can provide greater insight. Information retrieval tasks are used to test the performance of these factors. First, a study is introduced that examines the effect that fluid intelligence and Internet usage has on individuals. Second, a larger study is reported on that examines a collection of Internet and cognitive factors in order to determine to what extent each of these metrics can account for disorientation in users. This work adds to growing evidence showing that age is not a suitable metric to distinguish between individuals within the field of human-computer interaction. It shows that factors such as previous Internet experience and fluid-based cognitive abilities can be used to gain better insight into users’ reported browsing experience during information retrieval tasks.

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Section: Long Term Storage and Retrievalmentioning

confidence: 57%

An Analysis of Age, Technology Usage, and Cognitive Characteristics Within Information Retrieval Tasks

Crabb

Hanson

2016

ACM Trans. Access. Comput.

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“…There were no main effects for cognitive abilities; however, there were performance differences between the high and low memory span individuals for behavior with word tags (new word tagging differences were significant while word tag deletions were borderline significant). Westerman et al [50] investigated the impact of cognitive abilities (including several types of memory) and age as predictors of user performance in an hierarchical database in which node selection method was manipulated (i.e., explicit versus embedded menu). While this study found significant effects for both visualization and memory, the equipment and technology of the experiment is now outdated.…”

Section: Associative Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cognitive abilities are comprised of higher mental functions such as reasoning, remembering, understanding and problem solving [15]. Several cognitive abilities have been studied in information science, including memory [50], perceptual speed [1,2,35] and visualization [13,18], yet none of these studies has investigated the ways in which these abilities impact the user's perception of workload or interact with task complexity. While there have been studies examining these elements in part, there has not been a study that has examined all of these elements and their relationships with each other in one research design.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of cognitive abilities on information search for tasks of varying levels of complexity

Brennan

Kelly

Arguello

2014

Proceedings of the 5th Information Interaction in Context Symposium

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Although web search engines are designed as one-size-fits-all tools, people do not come in one size, but instead vary across many different attributes. One such attribute is cognitive ability. Because information search is primarily a cognitive activity, understanding the extent to which variations in cognitive abilities impact search behaviors and outcomes is especially important. We describe a study in which we explore how people's cognitive abilities affect their search behaviors and perceptions of workload while conducting search tasks with different levels of complexity. Twenty-one adults from the general public completed this study. We assessed participants' associative memory, perceptual speed, and visualization abilities and also measured workload. To evaluate the relationship between cognitive ability, task complexity and workload, we conducted three separate mixed factor ANOVAs corresponding to each of the abilities. Our results suggest three important trends: (1) associative memory ability had no significant effect on search behavior and workload, (2) visualization ability had a significant effect on search behavior, but not workload, and (3) perceptual speed had a significant effect on search behavior and workload. Specifically, participants with high perceptual speed ability engaged in more search activity in less time and experienced less workload. While the interactions were not significant, the differences were more pronounced for more complex tasks. We also found a significant relationship between task complexity and workload, and task complexity and search behaviors, which corroborates previous research.

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“…Combined with fluid intelligence, other cognitive factors have been successfully related to task performance including processing speed, short-term memory, and long-term memory. These factors have been used both as a combined cognitive ability scoring [4,5] and also as individual factors in their own right [12,24,26,29,34].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age, technology usage, and cognitive characteristics in relation to perceived disorientation and reported website ease of use

Crabb

Hanson

2014

Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers &Amp; Accessibility - ASSETS '14

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Comparative studies including older and younger adults are becoming more common in HCI, generally used to compare how these two different age groups will approach a task. However, it is unclear whether user 'age' is the underlying factor that differentiates between these two groups. To address this problem, an examination into the relationship between users' age, previous technology experience, and cognitive characteristics is conducted. Measures of perceived disorientation and reported ease of use are used to understand links that exist between these user characteristics and their effect on browsing experience. This is achieved through a lab-based information retrieval task, where participants visited a selection of websites in order to find answers to a series of questions and then self reported their feelings of perceived disorientation and website ease of use through a Likertscored questionnaire.The presented research found that age accounts for as little as 1% of user browsing experience when performing information retrieval tasks. Further, it showed that cognitive ability and previous technology experience significantly affected perceived disorientation in these searches. These results argue for the inclusion of metrics regarding cognitive ability and previous technology experience when analyzing user satisfaction and performance in Internet based-studies.

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Age and cognitive ability as predictors of computerized information retrieval

Cited by 50 publications

References 41 publications

An Analysis of Age, Technology Usage, and Cognitive Characteristics Within Information Retrieval Tasks

An Analysis of Age, Technology Usage, and Cognitive Characteristics Within Information Retrieval Tasks

The effect of cognitive abilities on information search for tasks of varying levels of complexity

Age, technology usage, and cognitive characteristics in relation to perceived disorientation and reported website ease of use

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