Modeling an Opportunistic Strategy for Information Navigation
Erik M. Altmann, Axel Cleeremans, Christian D. Schunn, Wayne D. Gray · Psychology Press eBooks · 2001
Our model interacts with a simplified, abstract representation of a Web browser and a Web site. Each site has one root node (i.e. the top page) consisting of a list of labeled links, each leading to a separate child page. For a shallow, one-level site, child pages are terminal pages, one of which contains the target information that the user is seeking. For deeper, multi-level sites, a child page consists of a list of links, each leading to child pages at the next level. The bottom level of all our sites consists exclusively of terminal pages, one of which is the target page. Our examples are balanced trees since we generally compare our results to studies that use balanced tree structures. However, our representation does not prevent us from running simulations on unbalanced trees, or even on structures involving multiple links to the same page and links back to parent pages.