Interdependence and Past Experience in Menu Choice Assessment

During goal-directed menu search the user assesses the relevance of an item to their goal and then has a choice between selecting the current item or continuing to assess the remaining items in the choice set. An obvious influence on selection is the relevance of the goal label to the task description (Franzke, 1995). Interestingly, Young (1998) has proposed that there is interdependency between the assessments of each item. Previous models, in contrast, have tended to assume that assessments were independent. A novel prediction to emerge as a consequence of Young’s normalization assumption is that the relevance of the distracter items to the search goal will affect the decision to terminate a search and select an item. More specifically, the assumption predicts that the presence of lower relevance distracters will result in fewer items being assessed. Another potential influence on the decision to select an item or assess further items is the history of previous experience. In problem solving tasks Lovett and Anderson (1996) have shown that an operator is more likely to be selected if it was previously successful. In menu selection it is an open question as to whether previous history of evaluation leads to more or less evaluation. The aim of the present study was to demonstrate that the decision to select an item is not simply determined by the relevance of the goal item to the search goal, but is strongly influenced by the relevance of the remaining distracter items and by past experience.