Abstract
With the rise of information technology, people can be faced with an overwhelming amount of information. As a consequence, search has become an important cognitive process to study for understanding how humans regulate their efforts across different resources to achieve their goals. Search is ubiquitous. In everyday life, people often face the decision, “to go or to stay?” For example, in apartment hunting, people need to decide if they want to continue visiting the new apartments or to choose the current one. Or, while finding information in the internet, people need to decide when they want to stop reading the current webpage and look up other information. There is well-documented evidence showing that older adults search less information in decision making and web information search. The talk will focus on answering the question, what makes older adults search less, with evidence from both applied and fundamental cognitive studies. Design implications on promoting information search for older adults will also be discussed.