Helene Hembrooke

In Google We Trust: Users’ Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance

An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google’s ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google’s result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine’s tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.

The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments

THE EFFECTS OF MULTITASKING IN THE CLASSROOM were investigated in students in an upper level Communications course. Two groups of students heard the same exact lecture and tested immediately following the lecture. One group of students was allowed to use their laptops to engage in browsing, search, and/or social computing behaviors during the lecture. Students in the second condition were asked to keep their laptops closed for the duration of the lecture. Students in the open laptop condition suffered decrements on traditional measures of memory for lecture content. A second experiment replicated the results of the first. Data were further analyzed by “browsing style.” Results are discussed from Lang’s Limited Process Capacity model in an attempt to better understand the mechanisms involved in the decrement.

The determinants of web page viewing behavior: an eye-tracking study

The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous information source and communication channel. With such an extensive user population, it is imperative to understand how web users view different web pages. Based on an eye tracking study of 30 subjects on 22 web pages from 11 popular web sites, this research intends to explore the determinants of ocular behavior on a single web page: whether it is determined by individual differences of the subjects, different types of web sites, the order of web pages being viewed, or the task at hand. The results indicate that gender of subjects, the viewing order of a web page, and the interaction between page order and site type influences online ocular behavior. Task instruction did not significantly affect web viewing behavior. Scanpath analysis revealed that the complexity of web page design influences the degree of scanpath variation among different subjects on the same web page. The contributions and limitations of this research, and future research directions are discussed.

Reliability and credibility of young children's reports. From research to policy and practice.

In this article, some issues, concerns, and research regarding the interviewing of young child witnesses are reviewed. The article focuses on research on suggestibility and the influence of various interviewing techniques on the reliability and credibility of young childrens reports. Implications of this research for future research and for policy are discussed.

The nature of children's true and false narratives

We review the research on the credibility and reliability of young children’s reports. We then provide details of a study that was designed to address some unresolved issues in the field. In this study, various suggestive techniques were used in repeated interviews with preschool children to elicit narratives about true and fictional events. Analyses of children’s narratives revealed that fictional narratives contained more spontaneous details, more elaborations, and more aggressive details than true narratives. Across retellings, false narratives were less consistent but contained more reminiscences than true events. These results are discussed in terms of the structural features of true and false narratives, the effects of repeated interviews on children’s accuracy, and the credibility of children’s reports. 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

The effects of repeated experience on children's suggestibility.

The effect of suggestive questions on 3- to 5-year-old and 6- to 8-year-old childrens recall of the final occurrence of a repeated event was examined. The event included fixed (identical) items as well as variable items where a new instantiation represented the item in each occurrence of the series. Relative to reports of children who participated in a single occurrence, childrens reports about fixed items of the repeated event were more accurate and less contaminated by false suggestions. For variable items, repeated experience led to a decline in memory of the specific occurrence; however, there was no increase in susceptibility to suggestions about details that had not occurred. Most errors after repeated experience were intrusions of details from nontarget occurrences. Although younger children and children who were interviewed a while after the event were more suggestible, respectively, than older children and those interviewed soon after the event, repeated experience attenuated these effects.

The effects of expertise and feedback on search term selection and subsequent learning

Query formation and expansion is an integral part of nearly every effort to search for information. In the work reported here we investigate the effects of domain knowledge and feedback on search term selection and reformation. We explore differences between experts and novices as they generate search terms over 10 successive trials and under two feedback conditions. Search attempts were coded on quantitative dimensions such as the number of unique terms and average time per trial, and as a whole in an attempt to characterize the users conceptual map for the topic under differing conditions of participant-defined domain expertise. Nine distinct strategies were identified. Differences emerged as a function of both expertise and feedback. In addition, strategic behavior varied depending on prior search conditions. The results are considered from both a theoretical and design perspective, and have direct implications for digital library usability and metadata generation, and query expansion systems.

The Suggestibility of Children’s Memory: A Social-Psychological and Cognitive Interpretation

The suggestibility of the child witness has been a concern of the American judicial system since the turn of the century. At that time, a number of studies (e.g., Binet, 1900; Marple, 1933; Pear & Wyatt, 1914; Stern, 1910; Varendonck, 1911; Whipple, 1909, 1911, 1912) were reported indicating that young children were quite susceptible to suggestive or leading questions. For example, Whipple (1909) wrote that “the one factor that more than any other is responsible for the poor reports of children is their suggestibility, especially in the years before puberty” (p. 162). Much of this early research, however, was methodologically flawed (Goodman, 1984a). Only recently has there been a resurgence of research on this topic. These newer studies have produced conflicting results as young children are not always more likely to succumb to suggestion than are older children or adults. Such complexities have raised questions about the nature and bases of the suggestibility of children’s memory (as well as adults’ suggestibility). Therefore, the major goals of this chapter are (a) to briefly review research on children’s suggestibility, (b) to describe social and cognitive factors that influence children’s susceptibility to suggestion, and (c) to address the theoretical significance of these factors.

Focused Activities and the Development of Social Capital in a Distributed Learning "Community"

This study examined the development of individual social capital in a distributed learning community. Felds theory of focused choice predicts that the formation of network ties is constrained by contextual factors that function as foci of activities. In our research, we examined how group assignment and location could function as such foci to influence the development of individual social capital in a distributed learning community. Given that networks with different content flows may possess different properties, we examined two different types of networks—task-related instrumental networks and non-task-related expressive networks. A longitudinal research design was used to evaluate the evolution of networks over time. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 32 students enrolled in a distributed learning class. The results show strong support for Felds theory. While serving as foci of activities to organize social interactions, both group assignment and geographic separation can also function to fragment a learning community.

Expert witnesses in child abuse cases : what can and should be said in court

Introduction Part I: Legal Structure and Professional Ethics Chapter 1 The Use of Expert Testimony in Child Sexual Abuse Cases Chapter 2 The Role of Experts in the Common Law and The Civil Law: A Comparison Chapter 3 Moral Justifications for Limits on Expert Testimony Part II: The Role of Expert Witness Chapter 4 The Trials and Tribulations of a Novice Expert Witness Chapter 5 The Expert Witness in Child Sexual Abuse Cases: A Clinicians View Chapter 6 Psychological and Ethical Considerations in the Preparation of the Mental Health Professional as Expert Witness Chapter 7 The Expert as Educator Part III: Evidence in Testimony Chapter 8 How Valid Are Child Sexual Abuse Validations? Chapter 9 Expert Scientific Testimony on Child Witnesses in the Age of Daubert Chapter 10 Expert Testimony Regarding the Characteristics of Sexually Abused Children: A Controversy on Both Sides of the Bench Part IV: Commentaries: Toward a Consensus Chapter 11 The Psychologist as Expert Witness: A Comment Chapter 12 Where Researchers Fear to Treat: Interpretative Differences Among Testifying Experts in Child Sexual Abuse Cases Chapter 13 A Legal Commentary: The Impact of Daubert on 21st-Century Child Sexual Abuse Prosecutions