ABSTRACT
The cultural origins of a user influence their expectations, understanding, and attitudes towards adopting an approach to information seeking and object identification. Culturally heterogeneous personnel may have different information needs for functionality, interaction and decision making in an information seeking scenario. Previous studies have shown that influencing people depends on providing information that is consistent with their cultural cognition, and these differences have a significant impact on behavior and decision making. However, there is no empirical study investigating the influence of culture on the cognitive workload of personnel during the performance of such tasks. Using the results from our research on identifying the impact of cognitive biases on search strategies in the domain of image analysis, we extend this study to understand the cultural impact on decision making and performance. We observe the impact of an individual’s culture on the search strategies employed in various image-based, information seeking scenarios. Our hypothesis is that users from different cultural backgrounds will adopt different search strategies in the task. Preliminary results show a tendency of the participants’ search strategies to be a reflection of both their culture and language.
