Establishing the Micro-to-Macro Link in Cognitive Engineering: Multilevel Models of Socio-Computer Interaction

We argue that the time is ripe to develop multilevel models that provide explanations at both the individual and social levels to extend research in human-computer interaction to the emerging area called socio-computer interaction. We provide three examples of such multilevel models. We first describe the SNIF-ACT model, which was developed to explain individuals’ information foraging behavior as they navigate through web pages to find target information, and to explain the general tendency for people to stay on any particular website. We then describe the social information Foraging theory, which characterizes how search efficiencies may be improved by utilizing social signals generated by other information foragers. Finally, we describe the semantic imitation model, which characterizes how individual users may generate social tags to index their own documents and could lead to aggregate indices that act as semantic structures that help other users to find relevant information. The models demonstrate the significance in capturing the social dynamics involved in systems that afford socio-computer interaction.