Objective The goal of this project is to explore a class of cognitive capabilities -related to information retrieval in the World Wide Web - as a prominent case of skills that rely on simple decision-making strategies tailored to environmental regularities. The rationale behind such a project is twofold. On the one hand, recent literature on information retrieval on the Web has failed to acknowledge the genuinely cognitive nature of these capacities. It seems, though, that the study of information retrieval skills could provide fundamental insights into some of the basic principles involved in perception, reasoning and problem-solving under limited knowledge. On the other hand, there is evidence suggesting that subjects do exploit a number of distributional regularities in the Web structure in order to solve problems - like relevance and authority assessment - raised by information retrieval tasks. The existence of robust environmental regularities and their recruitability in simple heuristics makes this case study an i deal area of application for a method of inquiry similar to the one developed in the ecological rationality framework. This project will be articulated in three steps: first, the characterization of the salient environmental regularities in the structure o f the World Wide Web that bear an informational value for subjects; second, the individuation of relevant cues compatible with the Web structure and with subjects and apos; cognitive resources; third, the study of different decision strategies based on the se cues to solve specific problems in information retrieval tasks. The expected outcome of this project is to provide a theoretical framework for orienting further research on information-retrieval skills as a cognitive phenomenon and to give a robust scientific foundation to applied research in this domain. Fields of science natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwarenatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternetworld wide webnatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligenceheuristic programming Keywords authority ecological rationality ecology of information environmental regularities fast and frugal heuristics information foraging information retrieval relevance trust Programme(s) FP6-MOBILITY - Human resources and Mobility in the specific programme for research, technological development and demonstration "Structuring the European Research Area" under the Sixth Framework Programme 2002-2006 Topic(s) MOBILITY-2.1 - Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships (EIF) Call for proposal FP6-2004-MOBILITY-5 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European Fellowships Coordinator UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON Address Gower street London United Kingdom See on map Links Website Opens in new window EU contribution € 0,00
