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Abstract Attention control regulates efficient processing of goal‐relevant information by suppressing interference from irrelevant competing inputs while also flexibly allocating attention across relevant inputs according to task demands. Research has established that developing attention control skills promote effective learning by minimizing distractions from task‐irrelevant competing information. Additional research also suggests that competing contextual information can provide meaningful input for learning and should not always be ignored. Instead, attending to competing information that is relevant to task goals can facilitate and broaden the scope of children's learning. We review this past research examining effects of attending to task‐relevant and task‐irrelevant competing information on learning outcomes, focusing on relations between visual attention and learning in childhood. We then present a synthesis argument that complex interactions across learning goals, the contexts of learning environments and tasks, and developing attention control mechanisms will determine whether attending to competing information helps or hinders learning. This article is categorized under:Psychology > AttentionPsychology > LearningPsychology > Development and Aging
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PaperPoles: Facilitating adaptive visual exploration of scientific publications by citation links
Finding relevant publications is a common task. Typically, a researcher browses through a list of publications and traces additional relevant publications. When relevant publications are identified, the list may be expanded by the citation links of the relevant publications. The information needs of researchers may change as they go through such iterative processes. The exploration process quickly becomes cumbersome as the list expands. Most existing academic search systems tend to be limited in terms of the extent to which searchers can adapt their search as they proceed. In this article, we introduce an adaptive visual exploration system named PaperPoles to support exploration of scientific publications in a context‐aware environment. Searchers can express their information needs by intuitively formulating positive and negative queries. The search results are grouped and displayed in a cluster view, which shows aspects and relevance patterns of the results to support navigation and exploration. We conducted an experiment to compare PaperPoles with a list‐based interface in performing two academic search tasks with different complexity. The results show that PaperPoles can improve the accuracy of searching for the simple and complex tasks. It can also reduce the completion time of searching and improve exploration effectiveness in the complex task. PaperPoles demonstrates a potentially effective workflow for adaptive visual search of complex information.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1633286
- PAR ID:
- 10371375
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
- Volume:
- 70
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2330-1635
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 843-857
- Size(s):
- p. 843-857
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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