Cognitive Overlaps along the Polyrepresentation Continuum

The principle of polyrepresentation is a coherent and comprehensive cognitive framework that can be applied simultaneously to the cognitive space of the user and the information space of IR systems. The principle has the potential to guide the design of interactive IR systems that take full advantage of the available document representations and user’s context to improve retrieval performance. However, before this can be achieved a number of issues need further investigation. Among these are simulation studies that test which methods would be appropriate for matching different representations of the user’s cognitive space with document representations. Such simulations could apply simulated work task situations; or they could explore exhaustively the possibilities of a number of controlled variables and thus simulate all achievable combinations. Investigations involving test persons and experimental laboratory tests (simulations) must take into account the dependency of domains, media and representation styles. Studies of the principles for how a Request Model Builder should function would be fruitful, and how to match representations to generate strong cognitive overlaps, especially in best match settings. The latter issue is illustrated by the polyrepresentation continuum. It points to the investigation of flexible and powerful hybrid matching of representations as a challenge and opportunity for future research along these lines.