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Will Time Matter with Cognitive Load and Retention in Online News Consumption?
Abstract
The production and consumption of online news are usually under a bursty temporal pattern. However, little is known about the psychological and cognitive impacts of such bursty consumption of online news. The study employs a 2 (filled-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval burstiness) mixed design experiment to examine how temporal characteristics in online news consumption influence audiences’ cognition and retention. Specifically, three temporal characteristics in online news consumption—filled-interval length, empty-interval length, and empty-interval burstiness—are controlled in the experiment. We instructed fifty-two participants to read a sequence of health-related news posts under various temporal settings while tracking their eye movements. The results showed that (1) empty-interval length increased retention, (2) empty-interval burstiness increased retention but did not have a main effect on cognitive load, and (3) filled-interval length, empty-interval length, and burstiness jointly influence cognitive overload and retention level. The study highlights the holistic perspective in considering the information exposure effect, thus revealing the complex relationship between temporal information characteristics and cognitive reactions and offering empirical suggestions to improve information system design.
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In this paper, we present results from a systematic review of research on Augmented Reality (AR) with a special focus on cognitive load (CL). A total of 64 studies from the years 2007 to 2019 were analyzed. The number of publications on AR and CL is steadily increasing. While studies are often conducted by multidisciplinary teams, most are from the US and Taiwan. From a methodological perspective, quantitative research methods with experimental designs dominate. Usually, studies are conducted as media comparison studies measuring effects of AR on declarative or procedural knowledge compared to one or more control groups. The examination of AR focuses on different components, with assistance systems and instructional materials being the most common. Mostly, studies are about see-through, marker-based, spatial, and location-based AR. Markerless or web AR applications are not yet in this sample. The influence of AR glasses on the cognitive load is most often investigated, followed by mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Among the survey instruments, the Nasa Task Load Index (Nasa TLX) is used most frequently; only three studies use dual task methods to measure the cognitive load. Implications for future research projects are presented and should contribute to the advancement of research on AR and cognitive load. More research is definitely needed.
The Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing (LC4MP) aims to understand message processing dynamics. Despite 20 years of research, no meta-analysis has assessed LC4MP effects. We conducted a meta-analysis of the model to examine three theoretical research domains in the LC4MP: cognitive load, motivation, and memory. Results from 142 articles and 683 effects demonstrate that pooled effect sizes for research domain range from r = .314–.398. Effect sizes vary by measurement modality with self-report resulting in the largest pooled effect size, followed by behavioral, and finally psychophysiological measures. We did not detect evidence of publication bias. These findings offer meta-analytic support for LC4MP research domains and are discussed in terms of falsifiability, predictive and explanatory power.
Push notifications provide news outlets with direct access to audiences amid concerns around information overload, disinformation, and heightened competition for reader attention. Such news distribution is relevant because it (a) bypasses social media and news aggregators, reaching readers directly; (b) alters the agency and
control of temporal news personalisation; and (c) reinforces mobile as the locus of contact between news organisations and audiences. However, push notifications are a relatively under-researched topic. We explore news organisations’ use of alerts, considering whether they attempt to integrate with existing mobile-user behaviour patterns or seek to be a disruptive element, garnering attention when audiences are not typically using devices. Through quantitative content analysis, this study examines the temporality of push notifications (n ¼ 7092) from nine Northwestern European countries,
comprising 34 news outlets. These data allow for comparisons at two levels: publisher type and national context. The study shows how the temporal patterns of push notifications’ dissemination align with existing news consumption behaviours; concepts of content-snacking and audiences’ rhythms and rituals are a useful lens through which these immediate, concise texts can be considered. Our findings show that news organisations use the mobile channel for attracting and maintaining users’ attention, with varying interpretations of temporal customizability.
Although self-report questionnaires are widely used, researchers debate whether responses to these types of questionnaires are valid representations of the respondent’s actual thoughts and beliefs. In order to provide more insight into the quality of questionnaire data, we aimed to gain an understanding of the processes that impact the completion of self-report questionnaires. To this end, we explored the process of completing a questionnaire by monitoring the eye tracking data of 70 students in higher education. Specifically, we examined the relation between eye movement measurements and the level of internal consistency demonstrated in the responses to the questionnaire. The results indicated that respondents who look longer at an item do not necessarily have more consistent answering behaviour than respondents with shorter processing times. Our findings indicate that eye tracking serves as a promising tool to gain more insight into the process of completing self-report questionnaires.
Background
Implementation intentions are mental representations of simple plans to translate goal intentions into behavior under specific conditions. Studies show implementation intentions can produce moderate to large improvements in behavioral goal achievement. Human associative memory mechanisms have been implicated in the processes by which implementation intentions produce effects. On the basis of the adaptive control of thought-rational (ACT-R) theory of cognition, we hypothesized that the strength of implementation intention effect could be manipulated in predictable ways using reminders delivered by a mobile health (mHealth) app.
Objective
The aim of this experiment was to manipulate the effects of implementation intentions on daily behavioral goal success in ways predicted by the ACT-R theory concerning mHealth reminder scheduling.
Methods
An incomplete factorial design was used in this mHealth study. All participants were asked to choose a healthy behavior goal associated with eat slowly, walking, or eating more vegetables and were asked to set implementation intentions. N=64 adult participants were in the study for 28 days. Participants were stratified by self-efficacy and assigned to one of two reminder conditions: reminders-presented versus reminders-absent. Self-efficacy and reminder conditions were crossed. Nested within the reminders-presented condition was a crossing of frequency of reminders sent (high, low) by distribution of reminders sent (distributed, massed). Participants in the low frequency condition got 7 reminders over 28 days; those in the high frequency condition were sent 14. Participants in the distributed conditions were sent reminders at uniform intervals. Participants in the massed distribution conditions were sent reminders in clusters.
Results
There was a significant overall effect of reminders on achieving a daily behavioral goal (coefficient=2.018, standard error [SE]=0.572, odds ratio [OR]=7.52, 95% CI 0.9037-3.2594, P<.001). As predicted by ACT-R, using default theoretical parameters, there was an interaction of reminder frequency by distribution on daily goal success (coefficient=0.7994, SE=0.2215, OR=2.2242, 95% CI 0.3656-1.2341, P<.001). The total number of times a reminder was acknowledged as received by a participant had a marginal effect on daily goal success (coefficient=0.0694, SE=0.0410, OR=1.0717, 95% CI −0.01116 to 0.1505, P=.09), and the time since acknowledging receipt of a reminder was highly significant (coefficient=−0.0490, SE=0.0104, OR=0.9522, 95% CI −0.0700 to −0.2852], P<.001). A dual system ACT-R mathematical model was fit to individuals’ daily goal successes and reminder acknowledgments: a goal-striving system dependent on declarative memory plus a habit-forming system that acquires automatic procedures for performance of behavioral goals.
Conclusions
Computational cognitive theory such as ACT-R can be used to make precise quantitative predictions concerning daily health behavior goal success in response to implementation intentions and the dosing schedules of reminders.
While smartphones and related mobile technologies are recognized as flexible and powerful tools that, when used prudently, can augment human cognition, there is also a growing perception that habitual involvement with these devices may have a negative and lasting impact on users’ ability to think, remember, pay attention, and regulate emotion. The present review considers an intensifying, though still limited, area of research exploring the potential cognitive impacts of smartphone-related habits, and seeks to determine in which domains of functioning there is accruing evidence of a significant relationship between smartphone technology and cognitive performance, and in which domains the scientific literature is not yet mature enough to endorse any firm conclusions. We focus our review primarily on three facets of cognition that are clearly implicated in public discourse regarding the impacts of mobile technology – attention, memory, and delay of gratification – and then consider evidence regarding the broader relationships between smartphone habits and everyday cognitive functioning. Along the way, we highlight compelling findings, discuss limitations with respect to empirical methodology and interpretation, and offer suggestions for how the field might progress toward a more coherent and robust area of scientific inquiry.
Crowds can often make better decisions than individuals or small groups of experts by leveraging their ability to aggregate diverse information. Question answering sites, such as Stack Exchange, rely on the “wisdom of crowds” effect to identify the best answers to questions asked by users. We analyze data from 250 communities on the Stack Exchange network to pinpoint factors affecting which answers are chosen as the best answers. Our results suggest that, rather than evaluate all available answers to a question, users rely on simple cognitive heuristics to choose an answer to vote for or accept. These cognitive heuristics are linked to an answer’s salience, such as the order in which it is listed and how much screen space it occupies. While askers appear to depend on heuristics to a greater extent than voters when choosing an answer to accept as the most helpful one, voters use acceptance itself as a heuristic, and they are more likely to choose the answer after it has been accepted than before that answer was accepted. These heuristics become more important in explaining and predicting behavior as the number of available answers to a question increases. Our findings suggest that crowd judgments may become less reliable as the number of answers grows.
Advancing theory in media exposure and effects requires contending with an increasing level of complexity and contingency. Building on established theoretical concerns and the research possibilities enabled by large social datasets, we propose a framework for mapping information exposure of digitally situated individuals. We argue that from the perspective of an individual's personal communication network, comparable processes of "curation" are undertaken by a variety of actors-not only conventional newsmakers but also individual media users, social contacts, advertisers, and computer algorithms. Detecting the competition, intersection, and overlap of these flows is crucial to understanding media exposure and effects today. Our approach reframes research questions in debates such as polarization, selective and incidental exposure, participation, and conceptual orientations for computational approaches. © 2015 International Communication Association November 2015 10.1111/comt.12087 Original Article Original Articles
This study uses meta-analytic techniques to examine the number of exposures that maximize consumer response to an ad. The results show that in an experimental setting maximum attitude is reached at approximately ten exposures, while recall increases linearly and does not level off before the eighth exposure. The findings are of interest for two opposing schools of thought in the advertising literature on effective frequency. They support the repetitionists’ beliefs over the minimalists’ beliefs on the number of ad exposures needed for maximum consumer response. The study further investigates whether the repetition effects depend on contingent factors. Low involvement and spaced exposures enhance repetition effects on attitude toward the brand. Embedded advertising and massed exposures enhance the repetition effects on recall. Repetition effects decay over time for both attitude toward the brand and recall. The study provides important implications for researchers by contributing to the discussion on effective frequency and providing support for the repetitionists’ view. This view has implications for practitioners who try to optimize advertising frequency.
Adopting perspectives from media displacement, complementary uses, and uses and gratifications theories, this study examines the relationships and dynamics between mobile news use and use of other mediums for accessing the news. Findings from a national sample in Hong Kong, which has among the highest mobile phone penetration rates in the world, found support for all perspectives. Those in the 18–34 and 35–54 cohorts were mostly multiplatform users of news, yet subgroup analyses reveal different patterns of complementary uses and displacement. Moreover, results showed that different gratifications predict mobile hard news use and mobile soft news use. Implications and future prospects for mobile news are discussed.
Most studies in individual differences in the field of working memory research use complex span tasks to measure working memory capacity. Various complex span tasks based on different materials have been developed, and these tasks have proven both reliable and valid; several complex span tasks are often combined to provide a domain-general estimate of working memory capacity with even better psychometric properties. The present work sought to address two issues. Firstly, having participants perform several full-length complex span tasks in succession makes for a long and tedious procedure. Secondly, few complex span tasks have been translated and validated in French. We constructed a French working memory task labeled the Composite Complex Span (CCS). The CCS includes shortened versions of three classic complex span tasks: the reading span, symmetry span, and operation span. We assessed the psychometric properties of the CCS, including test-retest reliability and convergent validity, with Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and with an alpha span task; the CCS demonstrated satisfying qualities in a sample of 1,093 participants. This work provides evidence that shorter versions of classic complex span tasks can yield valid working memory estimates. The materials and normative data for the CCS are also included.
Using the conceptual lenses of information overload and sense making, this paper investigates the process of contemporary news consumption based on the qualitative content analysis of 112 interview transcripts from a diverse cross-section of US news consumers. We offer theoretical clarification of factors influencing news consumption and the role of social media in devising strategies for addressing information overload in order to facilitate news sense-making and the resulting civic knowledge formation. We provide news organizations with suggestions for appropriately designing offerings to compete in the era of new media and offer directions for future research in the domains of news, product, and brand information consumption.
Information overload has become an ubiquitous problem in modern society.
Social media users and microbloggers receive an endless flow of information,
often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities to process the
information. In this paper, we conduct a large scale quantitative study of
information overload and evaluate its impact on information dissemination in
the Twitter social media site. We model social media users as information
processing systems that queue incoming information according to some policies,
process information from the queue at some unknown rates and decide to forward
some of the incoming information to other users. We show how timestamped data
about tweets received and forwarded by users can be used to uncover key
properties of their queueing policies and estimate their information processing
rates and limits. Such an understanding of users' information processing
behaviors allows us to infer whether and to what extent users suffer from
information overload.
Our analysis provides empirical evidence of information processing limits for
social media users and the prevalence of information overloading. The most
active and popular social media users are often the ones that are overloaded.
Moreover, we find that the rate at which users receive information impacts
their processing behavior, including how they prioritize information from
different sources, how much information they process, and how quickly they
process information. Finally, the susceptibility of a social media user to
social contagions depends crucially on the rate at which she receives
information. An exposure to a piece of information, be it an idea, a convention
or a product, is much less effective for users that receive information at
higher rates, meaning they need more exposures to adopt a particular contagion.
The congruency sequence effect, the finding of a reduced congruency effect following incongruent trials in conflict tasks, has received considerable attention in the research on cognitive control over the last two decades. This effect can reflect either the expectancy-guided, preparatory biasing of attention in anticipation of the upcoming stimulus (i.e. proactive control), or the phasic enhancement of the attentional set in response to conflict on the previous trial (i.e. reactive control). A recent study by Egner et al. in Front Psychol 1 (2010) set out to contrast these two alternatives, by exploring the congruency sequence effect across a wide range of inter-trial intervals. It was found that congruency sequence effects were subject to rapid decay over time. This decay fits well with the notion of reactive control, while at the same time speaking against the involvement of proactive regulation-which should also (and even mainly) be evident at longer intervals. In the present study, we first replicate the reduction of the congruency sequence effect with increasing inter-trial interval in a face-word Stroop task. In a second experiment, we show that congruency sequence effects are observed at longer intervals, too, when the proportion of trials with the longest inter-trial interval is increased. Our findings indicate that proactive control can prevent the congruency sequence effect from decaying rapidly.
An experiment with two computer-based sessions (complete data for 156 participants) examined selective exposure to attitude-consistent and counterattitudinal media messages. In the first session, participants indicated interest in politics and news, political attitudes, with four target issues embedded, along with attitude certainty and importance. Attitude accessibility data were derived from response latencies. In the second session, participants browsed an online opinion forum with eight texts about four issues, each with a pair of articles presenting opposing views. Selective exposure was unobtrusively recorded by software and coded as attitude-consistent and counterattitudinal based on individual participants' attitudes. Results show that attitude-consistent exposure dominated regardless of particular issue, with 36% more reading time. Higher habitual news use and attitude certainty both fostered attitude-consistent exposure. Selection of counterattitudinal articles was more likely among participants with greater interest in politics, conservative party preference, stronger party preference, more accessible attitudes, and higher attitude importance.
Making a decision can be especially difficult when it is based upon a large amount of information. A number of demonstrations in the literature suggest that decision making under information overload leads to suboptimal outcomes. In this article, we draw on construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003) and fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 1993) to suggest that psychologically distancing oneself from the information can be beneficial to decision making under information overload. Specifically, we propose that distancing prompts organization of information in terms of its gist. Across 4 studies, we demonstrated that increasing spatial distance, temporal distance, and abstraction lead to better decision outcomes when decision makers were overloaded with many pieces of information per decision. Furthermore, we showed that the relationship between psychological distance and decision outcome is mediated by gist memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Based on literature from the domains of organization science, marketing, accounting, and management information systems, this review article examines the theoretical basis of the information overload discourse and presents an overview of the main definitions, situations, causes, effects, and countermeasures. It analyzes the contributions from the last 30 years to consolidate the existing research in a conceptual framework and to identify future research directions.
The effects of repeated advertising exposures depend on the size of the interval, or space, between ad exposures. A meta-analysis of 97 verbal learning studies identified several stimulus characteristics and learning context factors that interact with stimulus spacing to facilitate memory for repeated information. The majority of the findings are consistent with the predictions of two enhanced processing explanations of learning--the retrieval hypothesis and the reconstruction hypothesis. These two hypotheses predict that an effective repetition strategy should encourage incidental processing during one presentation of the material and intentional processing during the other presentation of the material, but the hypotheses differ about the optimal order of these two types of processing. Thus, the most effective repetition strategy may be a combination of spaced exposures that alternate in terms of media that are involving (e.g., television commercials) and less involving (e.g., billboards, product placements). Copyright 2003 by the University of Chicago.
The increasing ubiquity of Internet access and the frequency with which people interact with it raise the possibility of using the Web to better observe, understand, and monitor several aspects of human social behavior. Web sites with large numbers of frequently returning users are ideal for this task. If these sites belong to companies or universities, their usage patterns can furnish information about the working habits of entire populations. In this work, we analyze the properly anonymized logs detailing the access history to Emory University's Web site. Emory is a medium-sized university located in Atlanta, Georgia. We find interesting structure in the activity patterns of the domain and study in a systematic way the main forces behind the dynamics of the traffic. In particular, we find that linear preferential linking, priority-based queuing, and the decay of interest for the contents of the pages are the essential ingredients to understand the way users navigate the Web.
The dynamics of many social, technological and economic phenomena are driven by individual human actions, turning the quantitative understanding of human behaviour into a central question of modern science. Current models of human dynamics, used from risk assessment to communications, assume that human actions are randomly distributed in time and thus well approximated by Poisson processes. In contrast, there is increasing evidence that the timing of many human activities, ranging from communication to entertainment and work patterns, follow non-Poisson statistics, characterized by bursts of rapidly occurring events separated by long periods of inactivity. Here I show that the bursty nature of human behaviour is a consequence of a decision-based queuing process: when individuals execute tasks based on some perceived priority, the timing of the tasks will be heavy tailed, with most tasks being rapidly executed, whereas a few experience very long waiting times. In contrast, random or priority blind execution is well approximated by uniform inter-event statistics. These finding have important implications, ranging from resource management to service allocation, in both communications and retail.
The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time-course of visual word recognition in a masked repetition priming paradigm. In two experiments, participants monitored a stream of words for occasional animal names, and ERPs were recorded to non-animal critical target items that were either repetitions or were unrelated to the immediately preceding masked prime word. In Experiment 1, the onset interval between the prime and target (stimulus-onset-asynchrony--SOA) was manipulated across four levels (60, 180, 300 and 420 ms) and the duration of primes was held constant at 40 ms. In Experiment 2, the SOA between the prime and target was held constant at 60 ms and the prime duration was manipulated across four levels (10, 20, 30 and 40 ms). Both manipulations were found to have distinct effects on the N250 and N400 ERP components. The results provide converging evidence that the N250 reflects processing at the level of form representations (orthography and phonology) while the N400 reflects processing at the level of meaning.
An experiment with 413 US participants was conducted to examine the role of animation in environmental journalism. Results show that there was no consistent modality effect (live-action vs. animation) on news perception and information-seeking across environmental topics. Specifically, animation was favored in the communication of fracking. On climate change, concern for the issue moderates the modality’s effect on news perceptions, information-seeking. The findings contribute to the literature of effective visual environmental communication by incorporating the modality effects perspectives, while also offering practical advice on how to effectively use animation to promote audience trust, news enjoyment, information-seeking with various environmental issues.
The limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP) is a model for understanding the dynamic interactions between mediated messages and the human information processing system. At the time of its original writing, the LC4MP was unique in the landscape of media psychology research in that it eschewed rote investigation of message effects and instead focused on investigating how message structure and content interact with and influence various biological systems of the brain and body. Since 2000, the LC4MP has catalyzed much progress in our understanding of the biological dimensions of message processing. This entry reviews the assumptions of the LC4MP, along with key concepts and methods used in the LC4MP literature. In addition, it discusses the core propositions of the model, highlighting ways in which they have evolved as the model has developed. Finally, it introduces a few areas in which the model is still under active development, pointing out promising areas for future research.
Ordinary users fill some intervals on the time continuum by engaging in an online behavior and leave other intervals empty by disengaging from the behavior. Existing time-based measurements of online behaviors exclusively focus on characterizing filled time intervals and completely ignore the information embedded in empty time intervals. Empty time intervals, referring to time gaps between consecutive behaviors, carry important information on how time is organized for online behaviors. By analyzing two behavioral log files on webpage browsing and mobile application use, the study evaluates whether online behaviors characterized by empty time intervals differ from or accord with online behaviors characterized by filled time intervals. Behavioral burstiness, which measures the distribution of empty time intervals in consecutive online behaviors, is found to unveil behavioral patterns that are distinct from temporal duration that measures the overall length of the filled time intervals of online behaviors. Temporal duration is much more extended in mobile use compared with web surfing, whereas behavioral burstiness in mobile use is lower than that in web surfing. Marked circadian rhythms are observed in behavioral burstiness in web surfing and mobile use, whereas circadian rhythms are vague in temporal duration in web surfing and mobile use.
Mobile phone use is an unfolding process by nature. In this study, it is explicated as two sequential processes: mobile sessions composed of an uninterrupted set of behaviors and mobile trajectories composed of mobile sessions and mobile-off time. A data set of a five-month behavioral logfile of mobile application use by approximately 2,500 users in Hong Kong is used. Mobile sessions are constructed and mined to uncover sequential characteristics and patterns in mobile phone use. Mobile trajectories are analyzed to examine intraindividual change and interindividual differences on mobile re-engagement as indicators of behavioral dynamics in mobile phone use. The study provides empirical support for and expands the boundaries of existing theories about combinatorial use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Finally, the understanding on mobile temporality is enhanced, that is, mobile temporality is homogeneous across social sectors. Furthermore , mobile phones redefine, rather than blur, the boundary between private and public time.
Background: Smartphones have reached levels of popularity and penetration where they are now suitable for use in population health interventions. A key feature of smartphones is push notification or in app messaging service, which can be used to alert users to messages or instructions pertaining to an installed app. Little evidence exists as to the persuasive power of these messages.
Method: We conducted a 24-week live user evaluation of push notifications used in a behavior-based mobile app for a meal replacement program to understand the role of push notifications in persuading users to engage with self-monitoring tasks.
Results: User perception of the prompts were verified through questionnaires, which in conjunction with the interaction logs show that users were tolerant of multiple daily prompts. The decline in compliance to the tasks set, however, shows that while the participants did not object to receiving prompts, they were less likely to respond to them as the study progressed.
Conclusions: Push notifications and user tasks are appropriate mechanisms to engage users with mobile technology in the short term.
This study focuses on the ironic situation in which news is more available than ever but people are becoming overwhelmed and thus avoid it. A theoretical model is suggested to investigate the relationships between perceived news overload and its cognitive and attitudinal consequences among South Korean Internet users. A structural model reveals that perceived news overload induced news avoidance by increasing news fatigue and news analysis paralysis. Furthermore, this study finds evidence that news consumers are willing to use news curation services to alleviate news avoidance and thus stay informed.
In recent years, with increased opportunities to post content on social media, a number of users are experiencing information overload in relation to social media use. This study addresses how Japanese Twitter users suffering from information overload cope with their stress, focusing on two actions: (1) The “unfriending” activities and (2) The changes in tweet processing methods. Objective data, such as numbers of friends, were collected through Twitter's open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and subjective data, such as perceived information overload and tweet processing methods, were collected through a web-based survey as a panel dataset (n = 778). The results demonstrated that although users experience information overload, they continue to increase their number of friends, and that the users who experience information overload modify their usage habits to avoid seeing all received tweets. In short, users do not choose a strategy to reduce the absolute number of received tweets, but only a strategy that involves changing the processing method of the received tweets.
The spacing effect refers to the mnemonic benefit of spacing repeated study events across time compared to massing (i.e. cramming) repeated study events. Due to the robustness of this finding, substantial research has been devoted to uncovering the spacing effect’s underlying mechanism. Specification of such a mechanism has been guided by consistent findings across methodologies and several experimental manipulations that serve as boundary conditions. Past reviews of the spacing effect literature have generally considered subsets of these factors but never an exhaustive set. Thus, the current review considers more comprehensively six consistent findings in the extant spacing effect literature pertaining to human memory to better discriminate among the previously proposed theories. Review of the literature provides substantial evidence indicating the need for an encoding variability mechanism [e.g. Glenberg, A. M. (1976). Monotonic and nonmonotonic lag effects in paired-associate and recognition memory paradigms. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 15, 1–16] in addition to a reminding mechanism [e.g. Benjamin, A. S., & Tullis, J. G. (2010). What makes distributed practice effective? Cognitive Psychology, 61, 228–247].
The recent availability of electronic datasets containing large volumes of
communication data has made it possible to study human behavior on a larger
scale than ever before. From this, it has been discovered that across a diverse
range of data sets, the inter-event times between consecutive communication
events obey heavy tailed power law dynamics. Explaining this has proved
controversial, and two distinct hypotheses have emerged. The first holds that
these power laws are fundamental, and arise from the mechanisms such as
priority queuing that humans use to schedule tasks. The second holds that they
are a statistical artifact which only occur in aggregated data when features
such as circadian rhythms and burstiness are ignored. We use a large social
media data set to test these hypotheses, and find that although models that
incorporate circadian rhythms and burstiness do explain part of the observed
heavy tails, there is residual unexplained heavy tail behavior which suggests a
more fundamental cause. Based on this, we develop a new quantitative model of
human behavior which improves on existing approaches, and gives insight into
the mechanisms underlying human interactions.
A critical specification lacking from much theory and research on organizations is that of time scale. Specification of the relevant time scale is as critical as the specification of the appropriate level or unit of analysis, a concept to which it is related. We define and explore five types of time scales and consider their implications for both the social constructionist and positivist approaches. Using examples from strategy and organizational theory, we show how the choice of time scale has important implications for the development of theory.
Approximately 40% of mobile phone use studies published in scholarly communication journals base their findings on self-report data about how frequently respondents use their mobile phones. Using a subset of a larger representative sample we examine the validity of this type of self-report data by comparing it to server log data. The self-report data correlate only moderately with the server log data, indicating low criterion validity. The categorical self-report measure asking respondents to estimate “how often” they use their mobile phones fared better than the continuous self-report measure asking them to estimate their mobile phone activity “yesterday.” A multivariate exploratory analysis further suggests that it may be difficult to identify under- and overreporting using demographic variables alone.
Chronemic research explores the involvement of time-related messages in communication, and has shown that time is an important component of the message in both traditional and online communication. Social information processing (SIP) theory posits that online communicators exchange social information through chronemic cues. This study points to a gap in SIP theory research, and proceeds to close the gap by demonstrating that changes in socially important attributes are reflected in measurable chronemic changes. A two-person social dilemma online game is used to demonstrate that changes in a simple chronemic variable, interpost pause, reflect differences in the players’ personality (level of extraversion), as well as differences in trust within the dyad. These findings support SIP theory by showing how online chronemics provide cues to important personal and situational information.
This paper presents a theoretical account of the sequence and duration of eye fixation during a number of simple cognitive tasks, such as mental rotation, sentence verification, and quantitative comparison. In each case, the eye fixation behavior is linked to a processing model for the task by assuming that the eye fixates the referent of the symbol being operated on.
This paper applies the limited capacity model of motivated mediated messages (LC4MP) to the problem of creating effective messages about cancer. A general descrip-tion of the model is presented and then applied specifically to the task of creating effec-tive cancer communication messages by asking the following questions about cancer communication: (a) What is the goal of the message? (b) Who is in the target market? (c) What medium will carry the message? and (d) What is the motivational and personal relevance of the main information in the message for the majority of people in the tar-get market? The paper concludes that cancer is a motivationally relevant topic that will elicit aversive activation. Target markets for various types of cancer-related messages (e.g., smokers or people of a certain age) will process mediated messages in predictably different ways making certain design decisions better for certain target markets. Both structural and content elements of messages interact with the limited capacity informa-tion processing system to impact resource allocation, which in turn determines how well messages are encoded, stored, and retrieved at a decision point. Individual differences in peoples' motivational activation influence both their tendencies to engage in risky behaviors that increase the probabilities of getting cancer and their processing of health-related messages. Future research from this perspective should be done to opti-mize cancer messages for specific target audiences using specific media. Why do we study health communication specifically? Is health communication different from other types of communication? Is health communication about can-cer different from health communication about other topics? Obviously, we study health communication because we want to be able to deliver effective messages about health-related information and behaviors to people who would benefit from those messages.
Email consumes as much as a quarter of knowledge workers’ time in organizations today. Almost a necessity for communication,
email does interrupt a worker’s other main tasks and ultimately leads to information overload. Though issues such as spam,
email filtering and archiving have received much attention from industry and academia, the critical problem of the timing
of email processing has not been studied much. It is common for many knowledge workers to check and respond to their email
almost continuously. Though some emails may require very quick responses, checking emails almost continuously may lead to
interruptions in regular knowledge work. Managing email processing can make a significant difference in an organization’s
productivity. Previous research on this topic suggests that perhaps the best way to minimize the effect of interruptions is
to process email frequently for example, every 45min. In this study, we focus on studying email response timing approaches
to optimize the communication times and yet reduce the interruptive effects. We investigate previous recommendations by performing
a two-phase study involving rigorous simulation experiments. Models were developed for identifying efficient and effective
email processing policies by comparing various ways to reduce interruptions for different types of knowledge workers. In contrast
to earlier research findings, results indicate that significant productivity improvements could be achieved through the use
of some email processing policies while helping attain a balance between email response time and task completion time. Findings
also suggest that the best policy may be to respond to email two to four times a day instead of every 45min or continuously,
as is common with many knowledge workers. We conclude by presenting many research opportunities for analytical and organizational
IS researchers.
KeywordsEmail management–Interruption–Performance–Simulation modeling
A large number of previous studies have demonstrated that visual search on Web pages is impacted by many factors, such as colors, fonts, information forms and information layout. However, there are few studies about the effect of information quantity for visual search on Web pages. To investigate this issue, we designed two experiments using eye-tracking. The information quantity of Web pages in Experiment 2 was the double of that in Experiment 1. Results show that the search time in Experiment 2 is significantly longer than that in Experiment 1. From the heat maps of Experiment 2, most of the fixations were on the upper area of Web pages, especially on the upper half. Further analysis indicates that in Experiment 2, both of the fixation duration and fixation count on the upper half of Web pages are significantly larger than that on the lower half. These results suggest that the increase of information quantity on Web pages reduces the users' visual search efficiency and this is the impact of information overload on Web pages. The reason for this effect is that the range of the users' vision is limited and they pay more attention to the upper area of Web page, especially the upper half.
One of the strengths of e-retailers is their ability to convey rich information to their customers. The theory of information overload, however, predicts that, beyond a threshold, more information leads to worse quality of, but a better subjective state towards the buying decisions. This study, via re-appraising the conception of decision quality, subjective state towards decision, and threshold of information load, proposes an extended model, considering the roles of information filtering mechanisms, on-line shopping experience, and perceived information overload, to examine the effects of information load on subjective state towards decision. An experiment was conducted to test the research model. The results indicate that rich information leads to a perception of high information overload; and the latter lead consumers to a worse subject state towards decision. Information filtering tools and on-line shopping experience may have influences on relieving but are not the panacea to the phenomenon of information overload. Novice consumers may face a more serious information overload problem.
Considerable evidence indicates that domain specific knowledge in the form of schemas is the primary factor distinguishing experts from novices in problem-solving skill. Evidence that conventional problem-solving activity is not effective in schema acquisition is also accumulating. It is suggested that a major reason for the ineffectiveness of problem solving as a learning device, is that the cognitive processes required by the two activities overlap insufficiently, and that conventional problem solving in the form of means-ends analysis requires a relatively large amount of cognitive processing capacity which is consequently unavailable for schema acquisition. A computational model and experimental evidence provide support for this contention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Humans are able to continuously monitor environmental situations and adjust their behavioral strategies to optimize performance. Here we investigate the behavioral and brain adjustments that occur when conflicting stimulus elements are, or are not, temporally predictable. ERPs were collected while manual response variants of the Stroop task were performed in which the SOAs between the relevant color and irrelevant word stimulus components were either randomly intermixed or held constant within each experimental run. Results indicated that the size of both the neural and behavioral effects of stimulus incongruency varied with the temporal arrangement of the stimulus components, such that the random-SOA arrangements produced the greatest incongruency effects at the earliest irrelevant first SOA (-200 msec) and the constant-SOA arrangements produced the greatest effects with simultaneous presentation. These differences in conflict processing were accompanied by rapid (∼150 msec) modulations of the sensory ERPs to the irrelevant distractor components when they occurred consistently first. These effects suggest that individuals are able to strategically allocate attention in time to mitigate the influence of a temporally predictable distractor. As these adjustments are instantiated by the participants without instruction, they reveal a form of rapid strategic learning for dealing with temporally predictable stimulus incongruency.
Predicting and Modeling Human Behavioral Changes Using Digital Traces
- F Kooti
Kooti, F. (2016). Predicting and Modeling Human Behavioral Changes Using Digital Traces
[Ph.D., University of Southern California].
- T Abdelzaher
- H Ji
- J Li
- C Yang
- J Dellaverson
- L Zhang
- C Xu
- B K Szymanski
Abdelzaher, T., H. Ji, J. Li, C. Yang, J. Dellaverson, L. Zhang, C. Xu, and B. K. Szymanski. 2020. The
Paradox of Information Access: Growing Isolation in the Age of Sharing (arXiv:2004.01967).
arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.01967
Dynamics and paradoxes of the ending process
- S Albert
Albert, S. (1980). Dynamics and paradoxes of the ending process. In S. Albert & E. C. Luck,
On the endings of wars (pp. 9-24). Kennikat Press.
TikTok User Statistics (2022)
- B Dean
Dean, B. 2020, November 4. TikTok User Statistics (2022). Cheyenne, WY: Backlinko. https://backlinko.com/tiktok-users.
A Psychopy Implementation of the Complex Span for Working Memory Assessment
- Z J Lau
- T T Pham
- D Makowski
- A Chen
Lau, Z. J., Pham, T. T., Makowski, D., & S H Chen, A. (2019). A Psychopy Implementation
of the Complex Span for Working Memory Assessment.
The Paradox of Information Access: Growing Isolation in the
K. (2020). The Paradox of Information Access: Growing Isolation in the Age of Sharing
(arXiv:2004.01967). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.01967