Psychology and information

Abstract

An aspect of the human use of information that has generally been overlooked in the automation of information services is the human tendency to locate information spatially. Computer-based systems do not necessarily assign any unique role to spatial tags, and so a feature of considerable importance for the organization of the user's memory seems to have been largely overlooked. The spatial dimension of human memory is discussed, and some suggestions are offered for exploiting it more effectively in the context of information retrieval services.