Searching Versus Surfing: How Different Ways of Acquiring Content Online Affect Cognitive Processing

An experiment tested whether people orient to and encode pictures selected from a Web site differently, depending on whether the pictures were selected by searching or surfing. Participants in the search condition spent more time selecting pictures than the participants in the surf condition spent. The pictures chosen in the search condition elicited cardiac orienting, while pictures chosen in the surf condition did not. Participants recognized pictures acquired by searching more accurately than they recognized those acquired by surfing, indicating that searching led to better encoding than surfing.