Exploring older women's confidence during route planning

Abstract

Exploring older women's confidence when route planningIn-car route guidance is automatic, requiring a minimum of time and thinking. This paper explores the use of personalised information when providing instructions for navigating a journey. We focus on older women with a lifetime of experience. Ten female participants were interviewed to elicit their comfort zone with respect to navigating in a car from their own home. Two routes were then devised for each participant that extended beyond this comfort zone, and presented to them in two different formats. Participants then navigated the route of their least preferred format. Questionnaires and interviews were used to explore the effects of the formats on their confidence, cognitive effort and use of cognitive mapping facilities. The questionnaire data showed that the more detailed instructions supported cognitive mapping processes and the interviews suggested that this support was valued prior to executing the route.

Curiosity and information-seeking behaviour: a review of psychological research and a comparison with the information science literature

“…Perhaps what kind of curiosity motivates the information-seeking is irrelevant for information science. This close association between epistemic curiosity and information need may explain why curiosity figures so rarely in information behaviour research and does not appear in any of the widely used models of information behaviour by Dervin (1992), Ellis (1993), Kuhlthau (2004), Savolainen (1995), and Wilson (1981, 2022).…”

“…Information behaviour research, to a large extent, however, is concerned with the behaviour of the person in their life-world when in search of information, with the sources they employ, how they formulate search strategies for search engines, how they use the information they find, how they discriminate between factual information and misinformation, how information is shared, and how it contributes to problem-solving, decision-making, and simply living one’s life. This is not to say that all information-seeking research is of this kind: some researchers do have an interest in the mental processes behind the formulation of information needs (e.g., Cole, 2012; Wilson, 2022).…”