ABSTRACT
When people search a set of Web labels for links that are relevant to their information goal, they attend to the labels and estimate the likelihood that the link will lead to the goal. Recent findings indicate that people sometimes, but not always, assess only a subset of the links available. We report an ACT-R model of Web-page search that was inspired by Young’s (1998) rational account of exploratory choice, but which was also sensitive to the psychological constraints encoded in the ACT-R theory of the human cognitive architecture. The behavior of the model differs substantially from previous ACT-R models of Web navigation, at least for single-page search. We describe an experimental test of the models behavior and qualitative and quantitative fits of the model to the data.
