Investigating automatic semantic processing effects in selective attention for just-in-time information retrieval systems

  • Authors:

  • John Meade;Fintan Costello

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland;School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • VISUAL'07 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Advances in visual information systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Just-in-Time Information Retrieval (JITIR) systems aim to automatically retrieve useful information on the basis of the user's current task and to present this information to the user without disrupting that task. We ask whether the cognitive mechanism of 'selective semantic processing' can minimise the disruptive nature of presenting JITIR information to the user. This mechanism may allow users to subconsciously filter out irrelevant information presented in the periphery of the visual field, while maintaining awareness of relevant information. We report an experiment assessing both attention to peripherally presented information (measured via recall) and level of distraction (measured via typing keystroke rate) in a JITIR system used to write reports on various topics. The experimental results showed that peripherally presented information that was relevant to a user's writing topic reliably entered their attention significantly more often than irrelevant information, and was significantly less distracting than similar but irrelevant information.