Confidence as Part of Searcher's Cognitive Context

A growing body of interdisciplinary NeuraSearch research in the Information Retrieval (IR) domain, built on the investigations evaluating searchers' neurophysiological activity captured during the information search interactions, advances the understanding of the searchers' cognitive context. Regarding the searchers' information needs, the cognitive context represents the surroundings of a knowledge anomaly perceived in their state of knowledge. Memory retrieval is a fundamental mechanism that drives the users' informativeness about their knowledge and knowledge gaps. Moreover, the confidence perceptions manifest the quality and attribute of the users' memories and could be, thus, used as a sign of the quality of memories aiding the user to appraise their knowledge abilities. We used the methodology of NeuraSearch to reduce the cognitive burden commonly in traditional IR scenarios posed to the users to understand and interpret their subjective perceptions and feelings. We investigated the patterns of spatio-temporal brain activity (captured by EEG) in 24 neurologically-healthy volunteers engaged in textual general knowledge Question Answering (Q/A) Task. We looked for i) the evidence of functional processes leading to descriptive (factual) knowledge memory retrieval and ii) their interaction effects incorporating retrospective confidence judgments. Our investigation raises further questions informing research in IR and the area of user information seeking.