Task and user effects on reading patterns in information search

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWe report on an investigation into people's behaviors on information search tasks, specifically the relation between eye movement patterns and task characteristics. We conducted two independent user studies (n = 32 and n = 40), one with journalism tasks and the other with genomics tasks. The tasks were constructed to represent information needs of these two different users groups and to vary in several dimensions according to a task classification scheme. For each participant we classified eye gaze data to construct models of their reading patterns. The reading models were analyzed with respect to the effect of task types and Web page types on reading eye movement patterns. We report on relationships between tasks and individual reading behaviors at the task and page level. Specifically we show that transitions between scanning and reading behavior in eye movement patterns and the amount of text processed may be an implicit indicator of the current task type facets. This may be useful in building user and task models that can be useful in personalization of information systems and so address design demands driven by increasingly complex user actions with information systems. One of the contributions of this research is a new methodology to model information search behavior and investigate information acquisition and cognitive processing in interactive information tasks.

Personalized models of search satisfaction

“…Note that within each user there are likely also effects on search behavior that can be attributed to the search task that they are attempting. In prior studies, search task has been shown to have a significant effect on users' search behavior [7][10]. Such effects are largely removed by averaging across all search behavior for a particular user.…”

News stories relevance effects on eye-movements

“…We use a similar approach to [Cole et al, 2011] which is briefly summarized below. We implemented a simple, two-state, lineoriented reading model incorporating main assumptions from the E-Z Reader model [Reichle et al, 2006;Rayner et al, 2011], such as that lexical processing of words is serial, one word at a time in the order of word appearance in text, and that more than one word can be processed on a fixation, because next word can be processed in parafoveal view.…”

Large-scale analysis of individual and task differences in search result page examination strategies

“…Cole et al [8] identified differences in reading patterns associated with different task characteristics and page types. Aula et al [3] identified two general patterns that people used in examining search results: exhaustive evaluators (54% of the participants who looked at more than half of the visible results for more than half the tasks) and economic evaluators (46% of the participants).…”

“…Previous work has shown that task and query characteristics impact search behavior. Cole et al [8] found significant differences in how users read results depending on the task. Downey et al [11] showed that user behavior following a query varied significantly with popularity.…”