Continue or Stop Reading? Modeling Decisions in Information Search

This paper presents a cognitive computational model of the way people read a paragraph with the task of quickly deciding whether it is better related to a given goal than another paragraph processed previously. In particular, the model attempts to predict the time at which participants would decide to stop reading the current paragraph because they have enough information to make their decision. We proposed a two-variable linear threshold to account for that decision, based on the rank of the fixation and the difference of semantic similarities between each paragraph and the goal. Our model performance is compared to the eye tracking data of 22 participants.