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Cognition in Structured Electronic Environments


How do we assess whether 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.

Reputation cues: production and consumption
Part of this project focusses on the study of authority and reputation cues driving knowledge acquisition and information retrieval in the Web. As Web users with a limited knowledge on the reliability of sources of information and other agents, we systematically make use of reputational cues in order to decide whom to trust in everyday information retrieval tasks. I am particularly interested in studying how algorithmic cues (such as ranking indicators) and social cues (such as those afforded by collaborative annotation systems) concur in determining trusting behaviour. This project aligns with current studies on information foraging

Folk theories of search engines
An issue closely related to the previous one is to understand how users rely on search engines as "experts" to extend their knowledge. Understanding the interplay between the psychology of search engine users and the strategies used by search engines to filter, rank and display search results is one of the goals of this project. I am especially interested in empirically assessing what Web users "know" or "believe" on the internal functioning of search engines, how they implicitly reverse-engineer what search engines do and, in turn, how this affects their searching behaviour. This project resonates with cognitive science research addressing the question of how we ascribe intentionality to cognitive artefacts as well as HCI research on query refinement.

Coordinator

Prof Nick Chater, University College London

Host

[ucl]
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
Marie Curie Actions logo

Keywords

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

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