Implicit imitation in social tagging: familiarity and semantic reconstruction

• Authors: Paul Seitlinger;Tobias Ley
• Venue: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Year: 2012

Social Tagging is a recent widespread phenomenon on the Web where people assign labels (tags) to Web resources. It has been hypothesized to support collaborative sensemaking. In this paper, we examine some of the cognitive mechanisms assumed to underlie sensemaking, namely social imitation. In line with the semantic imitation model of Fu et al., we assume that implicit processing can be understood as a semantic reconstruction of gist. Our model contrasts this process with a recall of tags from an explicit verbatim memory trace. We tested this model in an experimental study in which after the search task students had to generate tags themselves. We exposed their answers to a multinomial model derived from Fuzzy Trace Theory to obtain independent parameter estimates for the processes of explicit recall, semantic gist reconstruction and familiarity-based recall. A model that assumes all processes are at play explains the data well. Similar to results of our previous study, we find an influence of search intentions on the two processes. Our results have implications for interface and interaction design of social tagging systems, as well as for tag recommendation in these environments.