Search results

The purpose of this article is to elaborate the picture of the processes of information use by comparing conceptualizations provided by the constructivist approach and the human information processing approach.

The article is a conceptual analysis of major articles characterizing information use and human information processing in the fields of information studies and consumer research.

It is found that both research approaches share the assumption that interpreting, relating and comparing qualities of things is fundamental to the information use process.

The picture of information use processes is based on the comparison of two research approaches only.

Compared to the numerous studies on information needs and seeking, the questions of information use have remained under‐researched. The study elaborates the conceptual picture of information use processes by identifying similarities and differences between two major research approaches.

This article is a contribution to the development of a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of LIS in the hope of giving a more precise evaluation of its current problems. The article describes an interdisciplinary framework for lis, especially information retrieval (IR), in a way that goes beyond the cognitivist ‘information processing paradigm’. The main problem of this paradigm is that its concept of information and language does not deal in a systematic way with how social and cultural dynamics set the contexts that determine the meaning of those signs and words that are the basic tools for the organisation and retrieving of documents in LIS. The paradigm does not distinguish clearly enough between how the computer manipulates signs and how librarians work with meaning in practice when they design and run document mediating systems. The ‘cognitive viewpoint’ of Ingwersen and Belkin makes clear that information is not objective, but rather only potential, until it is interpreted by an individual mind with its own internal mental world view and purposes. It facilitates further study of the social pragmatic conditions for the interpretation of concepts. This approach is not yet fully developed. The domain analytic paradigm of Hjørland and Albrechtsen is a conceptual realisation of an important aspect of this area. In the present paper we make a further development of a non‐reductionistic and interdisciplinary view of information and human social communication by texts in the light of second‐order cybernetics, where information is seen as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ for a living autopoietic (self‐organised, self‐creating) system. Other key ideas are from the semiotics of Peirce and also Warner. This is the understanding of signs as a triadic relation between an object, a representation and an interpretant. Information is the interpretation of signs by living, feeling, self‐organising, biological, psychological and social systems. Signification is created and con‐trolled in a cybernetic way within social systems and is communicated through what Luhmann calls generalised media, such as science and art. The modern socio‐linguistic concept ‘discourse communities’ and Wittgenstein's ‘language game’ concept give a further pragmatic description of the self‐organising system's dynamic that determines the meaning of words in a social context. As Blair and Liebenau and Backhouse point out in their work it is these semantic fields of signification that are the true pragmatic tools of knowledge organ‐isation and document retrieval. Methodologically they are the first systems to be analysed when designing document mediating systems as they set the context for the meaning of concepts. Several practical and analytical methods from linguistics and the sociology of knowledge can be used in combination with standard methodology to reveal the significant language games behind document mediation.

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is the product of over a decade of research in the instructional science domain (Chandler & Sweller, 1991; Sweller & Chandler, 1994), and its applications to other areas of inquiry continues to expand (see Cuevas, Fiore, & Oser, 2002; Paas, Renkl, & Sweller, 2003a; Paas, Tuovinen, Tabbers, & Van Gerven, 2003b; Scielzo, Fiore, Cuevas, & Salas, 2004). The core of CLT is based on two sets of what are termed cognitive load factors that are either endogenous or exogenous from the viewpoint of an operator interacting with the environment. Endogenous (or intrinsic) factors are sources of cognitive load in terms of the general amount and complexity of information with which the operator has to interact. In training environments, intrinsic load is directly proportional to the amount of materials that trainees need to acquire. As such, the more complex the information is in terms of volume and conceptual interactivity, the higher the cognitive load will be. In operational settings, high intrinsic load can occur whenever informational demands that need to be processed are high. Within the context of human–robot team environments, there is likely to be unique intrinsic load factors emerging from this hybrid teamwork interaction (e.g., information produced by synthetic team members). Another source of cognitive load comes from exogenous or extraneous factors. In training and operational settings alike, extraneous cognitive load may occur dependent upon the manner in which information needing attention is presented. Specifically, the more complex the human–robot team interface is in relation to the process by which information is displayed and/or communicated, the more extraneous cognitive load can be present. For example, the technological tools involved in the communication of information, and the associated modalities used to process information may inadvertently result in cognitive load. Simply put, high extraneous cognitive load can be produced as a result of using sub-optimal information presentation and communication. Overall, exogenous factors can stem from the added complexity of human–robot operations in terms of distinct command-and-control systems that emerge from using novel technology. Within such operations, it is particularly important to control sources of extraneous cognitive load that have been shown to produce two distinct negative effects on information processing – redundancy of information and split-attention. These have been shown to attenuate processing capacity thereby minimizing optimal information processing (e.g., Sweller, 1994; Mayer, 1999).

A common finding of many surveys of corporate financial management practice is that the actual usage of normative financial models is infrequent. This is mainly due to the complexity of the decision environment, the use of information processing heuristics by decision makers, and the presence of psychological factors that influence the decision maker's behaviour. This paper reviews certain psychological concepts and their effects on the validity of traditional fundamental analysis in finance. Second, it discusses how cognitive limitations of human information processing may interfere with the implementation of certain decision rules in financial management, especially when decision makers experience information overload. Third, it provides a review of the advances that have been suggested to overcome the cognitive limitations of human information processing and to evaluate whether such advances can circumvent the psychological biases inherent in human decision makers.

Pew and Mavor (1998) called for an integrative representation of human behavior for use in models of individual combatants and organizations. Models with integrated representation of behavior have only been achieved at rudimentary levels according to those performing the studies (e.g. Pew & Mavor, 1998; Tulving, 2002) and those building the models (e.g. Warwick et al., 2002). This chapter will address aspects of cognitive performance that are important to incorporate into models of combat based on acceptance of theory, strength of empirical data, or for other reasons such as to bridge gaps where incomplete knowledge exists about cognitive behavior and performance. As a starting point, this chapter will assess which of Pew and Mavor’s recommendations are still appropriate as determined by a review of selected literature on cognition and its representation. We will also provide some review and extensions of key literature on cognition and modeling and suggest a way ahead to close the remaining gaps. Different aspects of cognition are described with recent findings, and most are followed by an example of how they have been represented in computer models or a discussion of challenges to their representation in modeling.

The paper aims to contribute conceptually to the conversation about organizational models and to the future development of an organizational diagnostic method, based on the human being seen as an allopoietic information processing gray box.

Methodologically, the approach is qualitative and interpretative, using the concepts of autopoiesis and allopoiesis of H. Maturana and F. Varela, the ideas of cybernetic machine, black box and functional homomorphism of W.R. Ashby, moving from the human being to the organizations producing goods and/or services.

Observing the human being as an allopoietic gray box allowed us to confirm the human being as an information-producing entity and the nervous system as its productive component. The functions distinguished were to emote, feel, perceive, think, memorize, decide, communicate, regulate, control, coordinate and move. Similarly, the proposed organizational model is composed of the same functions in which emoting is homologated with distributed leadership for the achievement of the organizational climate and to move with production. Notwithstanding the circularity of affectation between the functional components, the climate is the basis of organizational operation and consequently, the decisional closure distributed between owners and employees.

This is a theoretical proposal that needs to be discussed, and although there are precedents that could help in this regard, it is essential to enrich the model and derive thereof specific tools that can be applied.

A general model is provided from which methods of organizational design, diagnosis and treatment could be derived.

The proposed model is expected to be a contribution to organizational research discussion.

It is considered that the work has a certain degree of originality when proposing a functional organizational model of a general nature, based on the emotionality of the people that constitute it.

The objective of the paper is to amalgamate theories of text retrieval from various research traditions into a cognitive theory for information retrieval interaction. Set in a cognitive framework, the paper outlines the concept of polyrepresentation applied to both the user's cognitive space and the information space of IR systems. The concept seeks to represent the current user's information need, problem state, and domain work task or interest in a structure of causality. Further, it implies that we should apply different methods of representation and a variety of IR techniques of different cognitive and functional origin simultaneously to each semantic full‐text entity in the information space. The cognitive differences imply that by applying cognitive overlaps of information objects, originating from different interpretations of such objects through time and by type, the degree of uncertainty inherent in IR is decreased. Polyrepresentation and the use of cognitive overlaps are associated with, but not identical to, data fusion in IR. By explicitly incorporating all the cognitive structures participating in the interactive communication processes during IR, the cognitive theory provides a comprehensive view of these processes. It encompasses the ad hoc theories of text retrieval and IR techniques hitherto developed in mainstream retrieval research. It has elements in common with van Rijsbergen and Lalmas' logical uncertainty theory and may be regarded as compatible with that conception of IR. Epistemologically speaking, the theory views IR interaction as processes of cognition, potentially occurring in all the information processing components of IR, that may be applied, in particular, to the user in a situational context. The theory draws upon basic empirical results from information seeking investigations in the operational online environment, and from mainstream IR research on partial matching techniques and relevance feedback. By viewing users, source systems, intermediary mechanisms and information in a global context, the cognitive perspective attempts a comprehensive understanding of essential IR phenomena and concepts, such as the nature of information needs, cognitive inconsistency and retrieval overlaps, logical uncertainty, the concept of ‘document’, relevance measures and experimental settings. An inescapable consequence of this approach is to rely more on sociological and psychological investigative methods when evaluating systems and to view relevance in IR as situational, relative, partial, differentiated and non‐linear. The lack of consistency among authors, indexers, evaluators or users is of an identical cognitive nature. It is unavoidable, and indeed favourable to IR. In particular, for full‐text retrieval, alternative semantic entities, including Salton et al.'s ‘passage retrieval’, are proposed to replace the traditional document record as the basic retrieval entity. These empirically observed phenomena of inconsistency and of semantic entities and values associated with data interpretation support strongly a cognitive approach to IR and the logical use of polyrepresentation, cognitive overlaps, and both data fusion and data diffusion.