Fixation-related EEG frequency band power analysis: A promising neuro-cognitive methodology to evaluate the matching-quality of web search results?

Abstract

We used fixation-related EEG frequency band power analyses to study the evaluation of web search results. Participants were presented thirteen search queries, each followed by a Google-like list of six search results. One of the search results was a complete match (i.e., having strong lexical and semantical overlap with the search query), one a complete mismatch (i.e., having neither lexical nor semantical overlap with the search query), and four were partial matches, having either only semantical or only lexical overlap with the search query. We analyzed the EEG alpha frequency band power for individuals’ fixations during the initial viewing of each search result. We observed that on average the EEG alpha frequency band power at parietal electrodes was significantly lower for the complete match than for the other search results. Thus, this decreased alpha power might reflect participants’ detection of the hit in a list of search results.