Understanding the seeking-encountering tension: Roles of foreground and background task urgency

Echoing the urge for in-depth research on the mechanisms of the seeking-encountering tension, i.e., foreground and background tasks co-exist and switch between each other, this study conducted a true experiment based on 2*2 factorial design to examine the roles of task urgency in such tension. The experiment used an eye tracker and the build-in screen recorder to capture 39 participants’ eye movements and clicking behavior when they performed foreground search tasks in the laboratory, while the information related to the background task assigned in advance as coursework was embedded in the search results. It was found that the information seeking and encountering processes were interwoven and competed persistently with each other for users’ attention and actions, and the seeking-encountering tension led to a lose-lose outcome. While there existed negative relationships between foreground task urgency and multiple search measures, positive relationships were revealed between background task urgency and the examining of the encountered information. In particular, the high foreground task urgency suppressed the noticing of the stimulus related to the background task. The results not only enrich the understanding of multitasking in human information acquisition, but also generate useful practical implications for the design of search engines.