Jacek Gwizdka

University of Texas at Austin | UT · School of Information

This paper reports our investigation of differences in users' behavior between difficult and easy search tasks, as well as how these differences vary with different types of tasks. We also report how behavioral predictors of task difficulty vary across task types. In addition, we explored how whole-task-session level user behaviors and within-task-...

The search task and the system both affect the demand on cognitive resources during information search. In some situations, the demands may become too high for a person. This article has a three-fold goal. First, it presents and critiques methods to measure cognitive load. Second, it explores the distribution of load across search task stages. Fina...

The goal of this study is to expand our understanding of the relationships between selected tasks, cognitive abilities and search result interfaces. The underlying objective is to understand how to select search results presentation for tasks and user contexts. Twenty three participants conducted four search tasks of two types and used two interfac...

The CHIIR 2023 conference was conducted as a hybrid event in Austin, TX, USA, attracting over 110 attendees both physically and virtually. The main conference program spanned over three days and comprised of single-track presentations. Two workshops were organized on the day prior to the main conference, while the doctoral consortium and tutorial t...

Searching as a learning process implies that learning occurs during a search process and might happens incidentally, influenced by the context the search takes place and the system that is used. Searching and learning are not isolated but co‐occurring events. Research investigates how search systems can be improved to foster learning processes, int...

Needing and seeking health information often is a longitudinal everyday life information behavior that involves the use of technology. However, no reviews of consumers’ longitudinal health information needs (HIN) and health information-seeking (HIS) behavior have been conducted. We performed a scoping review to address this gap. Specifically, we su...

This paper applies eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods to investigate the socioeconomic disparities in COVID-19 patient mortality. An Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) prediction model is built based on a de-identified Austin area hospital dataset to predict the mortality of COVID-19 patients. We apply two XAI methods, Shapley Addit...

This study identifies the effect of six social correction methods on vaccine skeptics' intention to take COVID-19 vaccine. In April-May 2021, we conducted a 3 (corrector on Twitter: ordinary person vs. medical doctor vs. nurse) x 2 (correction strategy: priming vs. rebuttal) + 1 (control: misinformation only) between-subjects online experiment with...

Misinformation is an important topic in the Information Retrieval (IR) context and has implications for both system-centered and user-centered IR. While it has been established that the performance in discerning misinformation is affected by a person's cognitive load, the variation in cognitive load in judging the veracity of news is less understoo...

This paper applies eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods to investigate the socioeconomic disparities in COVID patient mortality. An Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) prediction model is built based on a de-identified Austin area hospital dataset to predict the mortality of COVID-19 patients. We apply two XAI methods, Shapley Additive...

The aging population brings a drastic increase in age-related conditions that affect cognition. Early detection of cognitive changes is important but challenging. Standard paper-and-pencil neuropsychological assessments of cognition require trained personnel and are costly and time-consuming to administer. Moreover, they may not capture subtle cogn...

Few studies examine how human information sources correct health misinformation on social media. This study investigates the proportion of healthcare professionals who intend to correct health misinformation on social media using various social correction methods, such as private priming, public priming, private rebuttal, and public rebuttal. It al...

Psychological resilience has emerged as a key factor in mental health during the global COVID-19 pandemic. However, no work to date has synthesised findings across review work or assessed the reliability of findings based on review work quality, so as to inform public health policy. We thus conducted a meta-review on all types of review work from t...

This study aims to determine the extent to which human information agents, such as healthcare professionals, respond to health misinformation on social media (i.e., by correcting it using private priming, public priming, private rebuttal, and public rebuttal, including reporting misinformation). Moreover, guided by social identity theory (SIT) and...

A large body of research has provided evidence that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms are associated with broad changes in attentional processes which are in turn implicated in core facets of emotion regulation. However, prior research has primarily focused on specific task-based evaluations of attention. In the current study, we evalua...

This study investigates surrogates' health information sharing behavior through information sources and information evaluation. A lab‐based experiment was conducted. Twenty‐five participants read five scenarios, each with three preselected webpages from a government, a commercial, and an online forum source. Participants had to decide whether to sh...

Cognitive load is one of the most studied constructs in NeuroIS [1]. Not surprisingly, we have identified 27 papers presented at NeuroIS retreats between 2012 and 2020 which included measurement of cognitive load or related constructs. This paper reviews terminology used to refer to cognitive load, mental workload and its variations, as well as the...

Background: Health misinformation is a public health concern. Various stakeholders have called on health care professionals, such as nurses and physicians, to be more proactive in correcting health misinformation on social media. Objective: This study aims to identify US physicians’ and nurses’ motivations for correcting health misinformation on so...

Introduction The global COVID-19 pandemic continues to have wide-ranging implications for health, including psychological well-being. A growing corpus of research reviews has emerged on the topic of psychological resilience in the context of the pandemic. However, this body of work has not been systematically reviewed for its quality, nor with resp...

BACKGROUND Health misinformation is a public health concern. Various stakeholders have called on health care professionals, such as nurses and physicians, to be more proactive in correcting health misinformation on social media. OBJECTIVE This study aims to identify US physicians’ and nurses’ motivations for correcting health misinformation on soc...

Health consumers can easily access information on the Internet. The quality of online health information varies and overall is concerning. The definition of eHealth literacy implies that consumers' ability to evaluate online health information varies with their eHealth literacy. A lab-based experiment was conducted to investigate how information so...

Background Health misinformation on social media is a public health concern, and healthcare professionals can help correct it. However, research on how they correct health misinformation on social media is rare. Objective To develop a conceptual model that demonstrates how healthcare professionals correct health misinformation on social media. Me...

An eye-tracking experiment (N = 24) was conducted to study differences in reading between automated and human-written news. This work adopted expectation-confirmation theory to examine readers' prior expectations and actual perceptions of both human-written news and automated news. Results revealed that nine eye-tracking variables were significantl...

A lab‐based experiment was conducted to understand how eHealth literacy and information source affect reading vs. scanning behavior on health webpages. Participants read 15 webpages from commercial, government, and online forum sources while their eye movements were tracked. Negative binomial regression and Kruskal‐Wallis tests revealed that high e...

The human eye plays an essential role in information acquisition from external world, and much of our contemporary information technology relies on visual processing. The eye-mind hypothesis suggests that human attention is connected to where our eyes are looking (Just and Carpenter 1980). Taken together with the continual movement of our eyes and...

We propose an image-classification method to predict the perceived-relevance of text documents from eye-movements. An eye-tracking study was conducted where participants read short news articles, and rated them as relevant or irrelevant for answering a trigger question. We encode participants' eye-movement scanpaths as images, and then train a conv...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce eye tracking as a method for capturing direct and indirect measures of online human information search behaviour. The unique contribution of eye-tracking data in studying information behaviour is examined in the context of health information research. Design/methodology/approach The need for multip...

The complex stochastic nature of eye tracking data calls for exploring sophisticated statistical models to ensure reliable inference in multi-trial eye-tracking experiments. We employ a Bayesian semi-parametric mixed-effects Markov model to compare gaze transition matrices between different experimental factors accommodating individual random effec...

We investigate the relationship between search behavior, eye -tracking measures, and learning. We conducted a user study where 30 participants performed searches on the web. We measured their verbal knowledge before and after each task in a content-independent manner, by assessing the semantic similarity of their entries to expert vocabulary. We hy...

Mind-wandering (MW) is a phenomenon that affects most of us; it affects our interactions with information systems. Yet the literature on its effects on human-computer interaction is only scant. This research aims to contribute to establishing eye-tracking measures that could be used to detect periods of MW while a user is engaged in interaction wit...

We continue investigating neuro-physiological correlates of information relevance decisions and report on research-in-progress, in which we study health-related information search tasks conducted on open web. Data was collected using an eye-tracker and a single-channel EEG device. Our findings show significant differences in pupil dilation on visi...

We investigated the searching behaviors of twenty-four children in grades 6, 7, and 8 (ages 11-13) in finding information on three types of search tasks in Google. Children conducted 72 search sessions and issued 150 queries. Children's phrase-and question-like queries combined were much more prevalent than keyword queries (70% vs. 30%, respectivel...

BACKGROUND As the quality of online health information remains questionable, there is a pressing need to understand how consumers evaluate this information. Past reviews identified content-, source-, and individual-related factors that influence consumer judgment of trustworthiness and credibility of online health information. However, systematic k...

Background: As the quality of online health information remains questionable, there is a pressing need to understand how consumers evaluate this information. Past reviews identified content-, source-, and individual-related factors that influence consumer judgment in this area. However, systematic knowledge concerning the evaluation process, that...

In this video, we introduce a real-time algorithm that computes gaze transition entropy. This approach can be employed in detecting higher level cognitive states such as situation awareness. We first compute fixations using our real-time version of a well established velocity threshold based algorithm. We then compute the gaze transition entropy fo...

We conducted an eye-tracking study where 30 participants performed searches on the web. We measured their topical knowledge before and after each task. Their eye-fixations were labelled as "reading" or "scanning". The series of reading fixations in a line, called "reading-sequences" were characterized by their length in pixels, fixation duration, a...

A lab‐based experiment was conducted to understand the multidimensional and dynamic changes in the use of relevance criteria on online news on search engine result pages (SERPs). Data from retrospective think‐aloud (RTA) was first analyzed to investigate the criteria used when participants selected a search result on SERPs. The number and frequency...

We present a case study of quality evaluation of online health information. Two participants were selected from a health information search (HIS) study, in which we are investigating consumers' evaluation of the quality of online health information. The selected cases offered a rare example of two almost exactly opposite eye-movement patterns on th...

With the growth in sensing devices, data logging capabilities and multi-sensory presentation interfaces, it has been argued that the future of documents is “multisensory, pervasive, and immersive,” and building an agenda around these themes is critical for future information science research. Hence, in this panel, we bring together an international...

We investigated differences in reading strategies in relation to information search task goals and perceived text relevance. Our findings demonstrate that some aspects of reading when looking for a specific target word are similar to reading relevant texts to find information, while other aspects are similar to reading irrelevant texts to find info...

Query auto-completion (QAC) is the ubiquitous information search function that displays a list of suggested queries, where the list changes as the searcher types. This article reports on an exploratory study of QAC usage during complete search sessions in a lab study of 29 participants, where a session comprised searching on an assigned multi-facet...

Assessment of text relevance is an important aspect of human–information interaction. For many search sessions it is essential to achieving the task goal. This work investigates text relevance decision dynamics in a question-answering task by direct measurement of eye movement using eye-tracking and brain activity using electroencephalography EEG....

The workshop will be the second in a series, building upon a successful workshop held at the SIGIR 2015 conference. The main aim is to focus on a narrow but highly important set of topics that have been identified in the last workshop and are of importance to IR and IIR researchers. The core theme of the workshop will be challenges is using and app...

Search effort is an important aspect of Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR). Prior findings show that higher cognitive ability searchers tend to perform more actions than lower ability searchers. In an eye-tracking lab study we investigated the effects of working memory (WM) on search effort. The findings show that higher WM searchers perform m...

We investigate query characteristics and click behavior on SERPs of children in grades 6 and 8 (ages 11 and 13, respectively). We employ Retrospective Think-Aloud (RTA) protocol to elicit children's thought processes while clicking on results and to identify the sources of information that shaped these processes. We analyze the effect of grade leve...

We investigate how children in grades 6 and 8 (ages 11 and 13, respectively) read search engine results pages (SERPs) in the context of searching Google. We use eye-tracking to detect children's reading of SERPs, and the effect of grade level and task type on reading behaviors and interactions. We have created a web search interface that retrieved...

The objective of this panel is to discuss a multi-faceted conceptual framework to link information literacy theory and practice. The panelists will present findings of their research into adult and young users' knowledge of and competencies in information literacy in varied information environments. The ultimate goal of the panel is to build consen...

Designed to measure subjective relevance judgment during information search.

In this paper, we present a cognitive-economic approach to examining the cost in information search. Unlike previous studies on economic models, we calculated the cost in information search based on participants' eye-tracking data as well as their behavioral data, such as query formulation, search task duration, SERP and web page visits. Using Prin...

The "Search as Learning" (SAL) workshop is focused on an area within the information retrieval field that is only beginning to emerge: supporting users in their learning whilst interacting with information content.

Differences in Reading between Word Search and Information Relevance Decisions – Evidence from Eye-tracking. Slides from paper presentation at NeuroIS 2016 in Gmunden.

Query auto completion (QAC) is nearly ubiquitous in modern search systems, however, there are few published studies on how searchers use QAC query suggestions. This study describes the use of QAC by 29 searchers working on eight assigned search topics in a lab setting. We found that our subjects had differing propensities to use QAC, with some sear...

In this paper, the potential for expanding the set of scientific evidence and insights associated with the users' role during the search process is explored. As it is intended to be a position paper and not a systematic survey, a comprehensive review of literature is not presented here. However, the authors draw on some early stage research, in thi...

This Tutorial+Workshop will discuss opportunities and challenges involved in using neuro-physiological tools/techniques (such as fMRI, fNIRS, EEG, eye-tracking, GSR, HR, and facial expressions) and theories in information retrieval. The hybrid format will engage researchers and students at different levels of expertise, from those who are active in...

This short paper presents initial results from a project, in which we investigated differences in how users view relevant and irrelevant Web pages on their visits and revisits. The users' viewing of Web pages was characterized by eye-tracking measures, with a particular attention paid to changes in pupil size. The data was collected in a lab-based...

Relevance, a fundamental concept in information search and retrieval, is 80-years old [4]. The recent decades have been ripe with work that brought a much better understanding of this rich concept. Yet, we still don't know which cognitive and affective processes are involved in relevance judgments. Empirical work that tackles these questions is sca...

In this paper we describe the Searching as Learning Workshop (SAL 2014) taking place at IIiX 2014 in Regensburg, Germany.

We present a system that supports Interactive Information Retrieval user studies on the Web. Our system provides support for user and task management, for processing web-based task specific interfaces and for Web-event logging. It also offers functionality useful to IIR studies that capture eye-movement on Web page elements. The system complements...

While many multidimensional models of relevance have been posited, prior studies have been largely exploratory rather than confirmatory. Lacking a methodological framework to quantify the relationships among factors or measure model fit to observed data, many past models could not be empirically tested or falsified. To enable more positivist experi...

Relevance is a fundamental concept in information retrieval. We consider relevance from the user's perspective and ask if the degree of relevance can be inferred from eye-tracking data and if it is related to the cognitive effort involved in relevance judgments. To this end we conducted a study, in which participants were asked to find information...

We present preliminary results from a Web search study, where we paid particular attention to the design of complex tasks. We used subjective, behavioral, and cognitive measures to investigate the effects of task complexity and, separately, of search user interface elements. Our findings confirm the expected task properties by design – no differenc...

There is growing recognition of the importance of learning as a search outcome and of the need to provide support for it. Yet, before we can consider learning as a part of search, we need to know how to assess it. This panel will focus on methods and measures for assessing learning in the context of search tasks and their outcomes. The panel will b...

The acquisition of information and the search interaction process is influenced strongly by a person’s use of their knowledge of the domain and the task. In this paper we show that a user’s level of domain knowledge can be inferred from their interactive search behaviors without considering the content of queries or documents. A technique is presen...

We examined user behavior on information search tasks at two levels of complexity. Users were divided into two groups according to their working memory span (WM). The results show that in more demanding task conditions both user groups change behavior, but they differ in how they change it. High-WM user performed more actions to find more informati...

We examined the effect of introducing search results overview in the form of a tag cloud displayed next to a textual search result list. Does such an overview make users faster in search task execution and lower the cognitive effort required to make progress? We use cognitive effort measures derived from eye tracking data to examine the effect of p...

This panel will discuss opportunities and challenges involved in applying cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging in information science. The panelists will discuss lessons learned from related disciplines and will consider how neuroimaging tools, such as fMRI, fNIRS, and EEG, could contribute to information science.

Effects of mental demands on searchers were examined by controlling tasks complexity and by assessing searchers' working memory span (WM). The searchers were divided into low and high WM group. We expected that on more complex tasks all searchers would perform more searches to find more information. However, only high-WM searchers performed more se...

Purpose This study seeks to explore technology use in a higher education classroom with the focus on tablet computers. Design/methodology/approach Study participants consisted of 36 undergraduate students from Rutgers University's Information Technology and Informatics major. Data were collected using an online survey, a classroom observation, and...

Click through events in search results pages (SERPs) are not reliable implicit indicators of document relevance. A user's task and domain knowledge are key factors in recognition and link selection and the most useful SERP document links may be those that best match the user's domain knowledge. User study participants rated their knowledge of genom...

a b s t r a c t We report on an investigation into people's behaviors on information search tasks, specifically the rela-tion between eye movement patterns and task characteristics. We conducted two independent user stud-ies (n = 32 and n = 40), one with journalism tasks and the other with genomics tasks. The tasks were constructed to represent inf...

In this study, we attempted to use dwell time on content pages as a predictor of document usefulness, and evaluated the prediction performance in different types of tasks. A user study was conducted to address this research problem. A total of 32 participants conducted searches associated with 4 different tasks, varying along several task type dime...

In this paper, we propose to personalize search result content through modeling multiple user behavioral measures in different ways as evidence for implicit relevance feedback for different types of search tasks. The point of this personalization is to predict potentially useful documents based on the type of task, and on multiple behaviors indicat...

The purpose of this panel is to look back on seven years of research on folksonomies and tagging systems and to summarize its main contributions as well as to try forecasting the evolution folksonomies will make in the future. Research findings which show the advantages and drawbacks of folksonomies and tagging systems in various scenarios and whic...

This video presents a novel visualization technique of interactive search sessions. The objective of this work is to enable characterization and comparison of interactive search sessions with respect to strategies and tactics employed by different people and on different search tasks. The visual aspect of this approach aims to off-load cognition by...