A proposed study of the differences in the way children perceive, approach, and behave in problem-solving situations is described. The behavioral measure to be used is *glancing,* which has been related to outerdirectedness. Children will be given two sets of two puzzles to put together. On the basis of the number of glances and the situation in which glancing occurs, the subjects will be assig...

With the aim of improving human-centric risk communication, this research in progress paper argues for a social-cognitive perspective focusing on the interaction between laypeople and the information environment. A model is designed to predict laypeople’s environmental risk perception and information seeking behavior. Using data from a national online survey (N=1,032), our research is an effort...

Automated recommender systems predict user preferences by applying machine learning techniques to data on products, users, and past user preferences for products. Such systems have become increasingly popular in entertainment and e-commerce domains, but have thus far had little success in information-seeking domains such as identifying published research of interest. We report on several recent...

The goal of point-of-purchase (POP) nutrition information is to help consumers make informed, healthful choices. Despite limited evaluation, these population-based approaches are being advocated to replace traditional, more expensive, individual behavior-change strategies. Few studies have examined the effect of POP information on buying patterns of college students, a group with high obesity r...

We describe an “expert coach” for students’ collaborative information seeking and knowledge construction. This coach compares an expert’s prespecification of the evidential relations among “snippets” of HTML-based text with the current state of a diagram constructed by students in the course of collaborative scientific inquiry. The expert advises the students by pointing out information that ma...