Finding interest in the stream

Interest, the curious emotion, plays a crucial role as an intrinsic motivator to encounter new things. It also plays a role in the establishment of longer term interests that people develop. Providing support for the experience of interest, and managing the development of enduring interests has potential to augment the effectiveness of information streaming applications. This poster briefly surveys 'interest' and considers the implications of a hypothetical Interest Machine that is able to measure interest and model interests

Making the news interesting: understanding the relationship between familiarity and interest

News feeds are an important element of information encountering, feeding our (new) interests but also leading to a state of information overload. Current solutions often select information similar to the user's interests. However, long-term interest in one topic, and being highly familiar with that topic, does not necessarily imply an actual interest response will occur when more of the same topic is selected. This study explores how important familiarity is in predicting an interest response. In a study with 30 subjects, interest was manipulated by topical familiarity using novel stimuli from a popular news source. This study shows, within this context, familiarity is moderately important for an interest response: familiarity does indeed make the news interesting, but only to a certain extent. The results set a baseline for predicting interest during information encountering, indicating familiarity is important, but not the only influential variable a system should consider when selecting information for users

The Shady Side Of Facebook: The Influence Of Perceived Information And Network Characteristics On The Attitude Towards Information Overload

This research paper analyzes the impact of information and network characteristics on the affective, cognitive, and behavioral attitude towards information overload (IO) on Facebook. By using an information overload model and the data of 300 active Facebook users it can be shown that the various categories of attitude are influenced by different factors. The level of determination of the behavioral attitude towards IO is lower than the level of determination of the affective and cognitive attitude towards IO. The identified antecedents of IO explain up to 36 per cent of the variance of IO. Results indicate that affective and cognitive attitude towards IO are more influenced by these antecedents as the behavioral attitude towards IO. Furthermore, results reveal that the amount of information an individual receives is the major predictor of all three dimensions of attitude. Several implications for adoption research are discussed

Driven to distraction : examining the influence of distractors on search behaviours, performance and experience

Advertisements, sponsored links, clickbait, in-house recommendations and similar elements pervasively shroud featured content. Such elements vie for people's attention, potentially distracting people from their task at hand. The effects of such "distractors" is likely to increase people's cognitive workload and reduce their performance as they need to work harder to discern the relevant from non-relevant. In this paper, we investigate how people of varying cognitive abilities (measured using Perceptual Speed and Cognitive Failure instruments) are affected by these different types of distractions when completing search tasks. We performed a crowdsourced within-subjects user study, where 102 participants completed four search tasks using our news search engine over four different interface conditions: (i) one with no additional distractors; (ii) one with advertisements; (iii) one with sponsored links; and (iv) one with in-house recommendations. Our results highlight a number of important trends and findings. Participants perceived the interface condition without distractors as significantly better across numerous dimensions. Participants reported higher satisfaction, lower workload, higher topic recall, and found it easier to concentrate. Behaviourally, participants issued queries faster and clicked results earlier when compared to the interfaces with distractors. When using the interfaces with distractors, one in ten participants clicked on a distractor—and despite engaging with a distractor for less than twenty seconds, their task time increased by approximately two minutes. We found that the effects were magnified depending on cognitive abilities—with a greater impact of distractors on participants with lower perceptual speed, and for those with a higher propensity of cognitive failures. Distractors—regardless of their type—have negative consequences on a user’s search experience and performance. As a consequence, interfaces containing visually distracting elements are creating poorer search experiences due to the "distractor tax" being placed on people's limited attention