BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Increased utilization of online medical information seeking demands investigation of potentially detrimental effects of these activities. The present study investigated whether viewing medical websites may adversely affect anxiety sensitivity (AS), a well-established risk factor for the development of psychopathology. METHODS Participants (N = 52) were randomly assig...

This paper will discuss key aspects of collaborative practice for researchers and professionals, who use or intend to use collaboration in practice or research. It will introduce our understanding of collaboration, then briefly review supporting research, explore how researchers collaborate with teachers and related professionals, and explore how teachers have integrated peer collaboration into...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for creative information seeking drawing upon Weisberg’s argument that creativity exists in everyone, and mapping the creative process described in the holistic model of creativity to the information seeking activities identified in the behavioural model of information seeking. Using scenarios of information seeking behaviour, mappings between the crea...

The ways in which people seek and process information are fundamentally epistemic in nature. Existing epistemic cognition research has tended towards characterizing this fundamental relationship as cognitive or belief-based in nature. This paper builds on recent calls for a shift towards activity-oriented perspectives on epistemic cognition and proposes a new theory of ‘epistemic commitments’. ...

This research set out to investigate the internet information seeking behavior of older users in New Zealand. The findings show that older internet users are diverse group with a wide range of skills and attitudes but that they do exhibit specific internet behaviors based on their information seeking behavior. A classification of how older New Zealanders use the Internet is presented based on a...

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...

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...