Reactive information foraging for evolving goals
Abstract
Information foraging models have predicted the navigation paths of people browsing the web and (more recently) of programmers while debugging, but these models do not explicitly model users' goals evolving over time. We present a new information foraging model called PFIS2 that does model information seeking with potentially evolving goals. We then evaluated variants of this model in a field study that analyzed programmers' daily navigations over a seven-month period. Our results were that PFIS2 predicted users' navigation remarkably well, even though the goals of navigation, and even the information landscape itself, were changing markedly during the pursuit of information.
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- Authors
- Lawrance, J., Burnett, M., Bellamy, R., Bogart, C., & Swart, C.
- Affiliations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Oregon State University (US)
- IBM (United States) (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2010-04-10
- Pages
- 25-34
- OpenAlex
- W2061632472
- Cited by
- 50
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 2.92
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web Data Mining and Analysis
- Keywords
- information foraging, debugging, web browsing, information seeking, information environment
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