A Cognitive Model of Web Navigation based on Semantic Information from Pictures

Abstract

In recent years, much research has gone into developing cognitive models newlineof web-navigation. LICAI (LI nked model of C omprehension-based Action newlineplanning and I nstruction taking) was developed to simulate an expert user newlineperforming unfamiliar tasks on a Mac interface. CoLiDeS (Comprehensionbased Linked model of Deliberate Search) builds upon LICAI by adding newlinea parsing phase during which a user parses a web-page into high level newlineschematic regions and selects a region that is most similar to the goal for newlinefurther processing. CoLiDeS+ extends CoLiDeS by incorporating contextual information from previous clicks and modeling backtracking strategies. While CoLiDeS and CoLiDeS+ model navigation within a website, newlineSNIF-ACT (Scent-based N avigation and I nformation Foraging in ACTArchitecture) and MESA (Method for Evaluating Site Architectures) were newlinedeveloped to model navigation behavior on the entire World Wide Web newline(WWW). All these models are inspired by the concept of information scent newlineformulated by Information Foraging Theory (IFT). newlineAccording to IFT, information scent is the imperfect perception of the value/cost associated with a particular action, such as clicking on a hyperlink. newlineA striking similarity between all the above models is that they operationalize newlineinformation scent as the semantic similarity between the user-goal description and the hyperlink text. They ignore all other content on a web-page, at newlineleast for computation. The central idea of this dissertation is that, not only newlinesemantic information from hyperlink text but also information from visual newlineand graphical modality like semantic information from pictures must be accounted for in the models of web-navigation. Not much literature was found newlineinvestigating the role of graphics on web-navigation. Drawing inspiration newlinefrom Dual-Coding theory, Multimedia Learning theory, Cognitive Load theory and theories on visual search and visual attention, we conducted various newlineexperiments to fill this gap in web-navigation literature. We explored the newlinerole of graphics and text in lo