Temporal modeling of group information foraging: An application to emergency response

This work seeks to uncover and explain the dynamics of information foraging within small groups. The focus of this work is collaborative information foraging within multidisciplinary emergency response teams during the response to a simulated emergency. The study investigates how such groups distribute their effort between the activities of information seeking and handling (i.e., processing) for information that is unique (i.e., initially held by one member) versus common (i.e., initially held by multiple members). Temporal analysis is applied to the data from a laboratory study of three such groups. The results suggest that temporal analysis may be used to model distribution of effort between seeking and handling, but not how this effort is divided between common versus unique information sources. Opportunities for future research along these lines are identified and briefly discussed. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.