A model of single-page Web-search: The effect of interdependence on link assessment

When people search a Web page for links that are relevant to their information goal, they attend to the labels and estimate the likelihood that the link will lead to the goal. We have previously found in a simplified single-page menu search task that people sometimes, but not always, assess only a subset of the links available. Importantly, the presence of lower relevance distracters resulted in fewer items being fixated; suggesting people may adjust an independent assessment of the relevance of a link, in order to derive an estimate that is interdependent with the quality of the other links in the choice set. Recently, we have presented an ACT-R model that was inspired by Young’s (1998) rational account of exploratory choice. The model makes use of ACT-R’s architectural assumptions in order to produce behavior that provides both qualitative and quantitative fits across a range of performance measures including eye-movement data. The behavior of the model differs substantially from previous ACT-R models of Web navigation