Confidence as part of searcher's cognitive context

Michalkova, Dominika and Parra Rodriguez, Mario and Moshfeghi, Yashar; Nicosia, Giuseppe and Giuffrida, Giovanni and Ojha, Varun and La Malfa, Emanuele and La Malfa, Gabriele and Pardalos, Panos and Di Fatta, Giuseppe and Umeton, Renato, eds. (2023) Confidence as part of searcher's cognitive context. In: Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science - 8th International Conference, LOD 2022, Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 13811 . Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, ITA, pp. 510-524. ISBN 9783031258916 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25891-6_39)

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Abstract

A growing body of interdisciplinary NeuraSearch research in the Information Retrieval (IR) domain, built on the investigations evaluating searchers' neurophysiological activity captured during the information search interactions, advances the understanding of the searchers' cognitive context. Regarding the searchers' information needs, the cognitive context represents the surroundings of a knowledge anomaly perceived in their state of knowledge. Memory retrieval is a fundamental mechanism that drives the users' informativeness about their knowledge and knowledge gaps. Moreover, the confidence perceptions manifest the quality and attribute of the users’ memories and could be, thus, used as a sign of the quality of memories aiding the user to appraise their knowledge abilities. We used the methodology of NeuraSearch to reduce the cognitive burden commonly in traditional IR scenarios posed to the users to understand and interpret their subjective perceptions and feelings. We investigated the patterns of spatio-temporal brain activity (captured by EEG) in 24 neurologically-healthy volunteers engaged in textual general knowledge Question Answering (Q/A) Task. We looked for i) the evidence of functional processes leading to descriptive (factual) knowledge memory retrieval and ii) their interaction effects incorporating retrospective confidence judgments. Our investigation raises further questions informing research in IR and the area of user information seeking.

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