Dario Taraborelli: Cognition in Structured Electronic Environments

Cognition in Structured Electronic Environments

Overview

How do we assess if a source of information in the World Wide Web is reliable? What strategies do we adopt to understand if a source contains trustworthy information? The goal of this project is to explore a class of cognitive capabilities involved in information search as a prominent case of skills relying on ecological regularities and simple heuristics. The rationale behind such a project is twofold. On the one hand, recent literature on information search on the Web has failed to acknowledge the genuinely cognitive nature of these capacities. It seems, though, that the study of information search skills could provide fundamental insights into some of the basic principles involved in knowledge acquisition, decision making and social cognition. On the other hand, there is evidence suggesting that subjects exploit a number of simple cues in order to solve problems - like relevance and authority assessment - raised by information search tasks. The existence of cues of trustworthiness and reputation in the Web makes this case study an ideal area of investigation for heuristic decision strategies (as information foraging models have recently proposed) and for specific biases in the assessment of reliability, trustworthiness and reputation. The expected outcome of this project is to provide a conceptual and methodological framework to orient further research on information search skills as a genuinely cognitive phenomenon and to contribute to a robust scientific foundation to applied research in this domain.

Coordinator

Prof Nick Chater, University College London

Host

Department of Psychology
University College London

Funding

This project is supported by an individual Marie Curie EIF fellowship (2006-2008).
Grant number: MEIF-CT-2006-024460

Keywords

information search; information foraging; relevance; authority; trust; credibility; ecological rationality; heuristics.

Bibliographic database

latest additions

References

Taraborelli, D. (2008)
How the Web is changing the way we trust, in: K. Waelbers, A. Briggle, P. Brey (Eds.), Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2008. (in press)
pdf full text
Taraborelli, D. (2008)
Soft peer review. Social software and distributed scientific evaluation
8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems - COOP 08, Carry-le-Rouet, France, May 20-23, 2008.
pdf full text pdf slides
Taraborelli, D. (2007)
Soft deference. How the Web is changing the way we trust
ECAP 2007: 5th European Computing and Philosophy Conference, Twente, June 21-23, 2007
pdf extended abstract
Taraborelli, D. (2007)
How not to be fooled by cardboard rabbits. Heuristics for epistemic reliability judgments in the World Wide Web
Persuasive 07: 2nd International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Stanford University, Stanford University, April 27-28, 2007. (poster)
pdf full text
Taraborelli, D. (2006)
Simple heuristics in information search: How to measure authority?
Invited talk, UCLIC Seminar (UCL Interaction Centre), London, May 10, 2006
Taraborelli, D. (2006)
Simple heuristics for authority assessment
Invited talk, "La ciencia como proceso cultural", Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades (CEIICH) - UNAM, Mexico City, June 2005

Dario Taraborelli : csee