The Exploration stage of the ISP model

Almost 30 years later and the Information Search Process (ISP) model for knowledge remains as one of the most cited key theoretical frameworks in the discipline of Information Science. One of the ISP stages is the Exploration Stage. In this stage:

Knowledge of a topic is gathered and a new personal knowledge is created. The individual endeavors to locate new knowledge to situate with previous understanding of the topic. Feelings of anxiety may be experienced if inconsistent and incompatible knowledge found.

Most recent studies have emphasized the need for baseline studies to begin establishing neurophysiological data that help create foundations in understanding the underlying neurophysiology of behavior in information retrieval, such as information searching (Mostafa & Gwisdka, 2016).

This thesis attempted to establish a solid baseline for future researchers to understand the neurophysiology as well as the affective path of the information search process within the field of information science.

One of the goals of this thesis was to integrate the disciplines of neuroscience, information science, and cognitive psychology, while exploring possible connections among:

1. The affective states of the ISP model (Kuhlthau, 1991).
2. The corresponding emotional dimensions, valence versus arousal (Russell, 1980).
3. The corresponding neural oscillations, brain activities: alpha, beta, gamma (Sarraf, 2019).

This illustration summarizes some of the high-level integrated findings:

To help simplify and shorten this blog post, Russell’s valence-arousal correspondent axis is not included in the above illustration. It is, however, part of the thesis.

For your reference, here are brain lobes mentioned above:

What this all means is open to interpretations, some of which I have addressed in the thesis.