A Study on Task Switching in Information Search on the Web
Ryoko Fukuzawa (AY 2011)
We often stumble upon useful information unintentionally. Serendipity is a concept that describes such serendipitous phenomena, and it is a topic that has attracted much attention in recent years.
One of the problems in studying serendipity is how to capture this phenomenon, which is not easy to predict, in an experimental setting. It is difficult to understand because it is contingent. Therefore, in this study, we considered this phenomenon as a background of multitasking because such contingency is considered in the field of information seeking as a phenomenon in which a person, while engaged in one task, interrupts the task he or she is engaged in and performs another task after a trigger. We reasoned that understanding the triggers of multitask switching would lead to an understanding of the contingent phenomenon. Previous research on methods to capture task switching in an experimental setting is limited in the context of task switching that has been tested, and furthermore, in a given task environment; therefore, we sought to understand switching in multitasking through behavioral analysis and to clarify the relationship between switching and task by The purpose of the study was to understand switching in multitasking through behavioral analysis and to clarify the relationship between switching and task by independent exploration.
An experiment was conducted with 48 participants, including university students and working adults. During the 45-minute experiment, participants were asked to freely perform individual tasks and switch between tasks using the Internet, and to answer questionnaires about the importance and urgency of the task they were engaged in at any time during the task-switching process. After the work was completed, a postsea1°Ch mterview was conducted on the task switching during the work.
Statistical analysis of the data obtained from the experiment revealed the following. First, since contingency is the phenomenon of interrupting the task in which one is engaged to perform another task, we examined whether the context of switching differed depending on the degree of accomplishment of the previous task (i.e., in progress or accomplished). The results showed that the switching context tended to be influenced by the media being worked on, such as finding an interesting word (XX) or seeing an image (XX), in which case the urgency of the previous task tended to be lower. We also considered that the occurrence of a new task might also have the potential to be part of the contingency phenomenon, and analyzed the novelty of the task engaged in, and found that when a new task occurs, it tends to be more important and less urgent than the task immediately before it. Furthermore, we found that there are factors other than the embedded information that make people aware of the occurrence of a task, and we also typified the task awareness process based on these factors.
Future directions include revising the experimental environment setting based on the findings of this experiment and working to understand contingent phenomena such as serendipity.
(Translated by DeepL)