Individual differences in knowledge network navigation

TL;DR

It is shown that age negatively affects knowledge space navigation performance, while multilingualism enhances it and under time pressure, participants’ performance improves across trials and males outperform females, an effect not observed in games without time pressure.

Abstract

With the rapid accumulation of online information, efficient web navigation has grown vital yet challenging. To create an easily navigable cyberspace catering to diverse demographics, understanding how people navigate differently is paramount. While previous research has unveiled individual differences in spatial navigation, such differences in knowledge space navigation remain sparse. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed personal information questionnaires. Our analysis shows that age negatively affects knowledge space navigation performance, while multilingualism enhances it. Under time pressure, participants' performance improves across trials and males outperform females, an effect not observed in games without time pressure. In our experiment, successful route-finding is usually not related to abilities of innovative exploration of routes. Our results underline the importance of age, multilingualism and time constraint in the knowledge space navigation.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Illustration of the Wikipedia navigation game. In the Wikipedia navigation game, players need to go from one Wikipedia article (source page) to another (target page) through the links of other Wikipedia articles on the current page in 7 steps (Least-clicks game) or 150 seconds (Speed-race game). The figure shows two possible navigation paths from the source page Barack Obama to the target page Vincent van Gogh: 1) Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron to France to Vincent van Gogh (solid arrows); and 2) Barack Obama to Bachelor of Arts to Art to Vincent van Gogh (dotted arrows). Participants each played nine rounds of games whose source page and target page are shown in the figure. The games are divided into three sessions A, O, and B, with three games in each session. The order of the games is randomized in each game session, and the order of sessions A and B are randomized to reduce the effect of the games' order on performance. Attributions to the images used in the figure are included in the references fig1fig2fig3fig4fig5fig6.
• Figure 2: Performance in subgroups. The figure shows the navigation performance distribution for participants with different characteristics, where performance is measured as the ratio of games won by each participant. Fig. a-h shows the distribution of navigation performance for the participants' eight characteristics: a) age, b) gender, c) foreign language skills, d) ethnic background, e) political view, f) spatial navigation skills (the first principal component of the spatial navigation related questions $Spatial_{1}$), g) prior experience with the Wikipedia navigation game and h-i) the percentage of deviance explained by each variable as they were added as the covariate to the regression model (see details in Methods) in the Speed-race game and Least-clicks game respectively, normalized by the total variance explained by the multiple regression of all individual characteristics in Table \ref{['tab:Regression']}.
• Figure 3: Distribution of Performance and Uniqueness. a) shows the distribution of the total number of games the participants won in the experiment. b) shows the distribution of uniqueness scores for both successful and unsuccessful navigation paths. The uniqueness score quantifies the distinctiveness of a navigation path relative to others. For the definition and computation of the uniqueness score, refer to the Methods section.
• Figure 4: Visualization of the uniqueness scores of the navigation routes The figure displays uniqueness scores for successful navigation paths across nine distinct games. The black circle and triangle denote the source and target Wikipedia pages of the respective game, and black dots represent visited Wikipedia articles, and their positions reflect their new two-dimensional coordinates derived from reducing the original 64-dimensional embeddings using the TSNE technique van2008visualizing. Lines indicate successful navigation paths within the games, with line color corresponding to the uniqueness scores of these paths.