Research On Team Cognitive Mechanism In Collaborative Information Seeking Based On Shared Mental Model

With the incremental explosion of information and the rapid innovation of intelligent technology,"collaborative interaction" has gradually become an important feature of user information seeking behavior in the context of the new era,and it has certain universality and necessity.This study incorporates team cognition into collaborative information seeking research,which helps to better reveal and understand the behavior characteristics,behavior evolution and interaction patterns of team members in collaborative information seeking activities.The research object of this paper is the team cognition mechanism in collaborative information seeking.The team cognition is represented by shared mental model.This study is to explore the formation and evolution of team shared mental model and related influencing factors during different collaborative search tasks.The user experiment method was used to conduct user study,and 48 college students with different professional backgrounds were recruited to participate in the experiment.They were divided into 16 search teams,randomly divided into two task groups: decision-making task group and exploration task group.The collaborative search team's verbal protocols data,interview data,and behavioral data were collected by recording.Guided by grounded theory approach,taking open coding,axial coding and selective coding to analysis the verbal protocols data and some interview data,we identified four core categories: individual perception and exploration,team task analysis,team information collection and team information decision-making/integration,and constructed the shared mental model construction process model under the two collaborative search tasks(decision-making task and exploration task).In addition,we have clarified and summarized the cognitive activities and cognitive results(the shared mental model content elements)of the main links in the above two process models,and discussed the similarities and differences of team cognitive activities in the two typical collaborative search tasks.Guided by grounded theory approach,taking open coding,axial coding and selective coding to analysis the interview data,we identified eight influencing factors related to the collaborative search team's shared mental model construction(member personality,member team awareness,leader ability,task structure characteristics,team relationship,team communication,information sharing,and team atmosphere),and constructed a theoretical model on the influencing factors of the collaborative search team's shared mental modelconstruction.This research is a qualitative study around the "collaborative search team shared mental model",which is an exploratory study.The research results should contribute to deepen the overall understanding of collaborative information seeking and promote the improvement of user information acquisition ability,providing some inspiration and reference for collaborative seeking team management and collaborative information seeking system and platform optimization.