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Interactive effects of age and interface differences on search strategies and performance

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We present results from an experiment that studied the information search behavior of younger and older adults in a medical decision-making task. To study how different combination of tasks and interfaces influenced search strategies and decision-making outcomes, we varied information structures of two interfaces and presented different task descriptions to participants. We found that younger adults tended to use different search strategies in different combination of tasks and interfaces, and older adults tended to use the same top-down strategies across conditions. We concluded that older adults were able to perform mental transformation of medical terms more effectively than younger adults. Thus older adults did not require changing strategies to maintain the same level of performance.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. age differences
  2. cost-benefit analysis
  3. interface affordance
  4. knowledge structure
  5. search strategies
  6. web search

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  • (2024)Naturalistic Digital Behavior Predicts Cognitive AbilitiesACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/366034131:3(1-32)Online publication date: 7-May-2024
  • (2024)Anther: Cross-Pollinating Communities of Practice via Video TutorialsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660727(1991-2005)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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