User study on older adults’ use of the Web and search engines
Universal Access in the Information Society
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Behaviour & Information Technology
Adaptive information search: age-dependent interactions between cognitive profiles and strategies
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Older people as information seekers: exploratory studies about their needs and strategies
UAHCI'07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Universal access in human computer interaction: coping with diversity
In search of information on websites: a question of age?
UAHCI'11 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Universal access in human-computer interaction: users diversity - Volume Part II
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Information search is one of the main reasons that older adults go online, but older adults experience more difficulties than younger adults when interacting with search engines. In this study, 15 younger and 14 older participants completed a battery of cognitive tasks, and then searched for information via a realistic search simulator. Older participants searched using a more methodical strategy that entailed careful word selection and serial processing of search results, while younger participants used a more impulsive strategy whereby they scanned search results quickly and jumped between links more frequently. In keeping with past studies, older adults displayed lower cognitive flexibility, but these deficiencies were apparently offset by their search strategy, and young and old participants ultimately found information in similar amounts of time. We argue that, while age-related cognitive changes certainly exist, their effect on older adults' interactions with search engines may be due to mismatches between older adults' search strategies and the design of current versions of popular search interfaces.