ABSTRACT
During goal-directed menu search the user assesses the relevance of an item to their goal and then has a choice between selecting the current item or continuing to assess the remaining items in the choice set. An obvious influence on selection is the relevance of the goal label to the task description (Franzke, 1995). Interestingly, Young (1998) has proposed that there is interdependency between the assessments of each item. Previous models, in contrast, have tended to assume that assessments were independent. A novel prediction to emerge as a consequence of Young’s normalization assumption is that the relevance of the distracter items to the search goal will affect the decision to terminate a search and select an item. More specifically, the assumption predicts that the presence of lower relevance distracters will result in fewer items being assessed.
