Hi, I'm Kaixin Ji (吉凯昕)
PhD, RMIT University & ADM+S (ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society)
Keywords: Cognitive Bias, Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR), Wearable Neuro-Physiological Sensors, User Study
Thesis: Measuring Information Behaviors and Cognitive Bias Using Wearables[Link]
Information seeking involves a continuous interplay of attention, memory, reasoning, and decision-making. My PhD investigated how wearable technology can capture the way our cognition and emotions shift as we search for information, using controlled lab studies and consumer-grade neuro-physiological wearables: EEG, Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), motion, and eye-tracking. Study 1 — I updated a theoretical model mapping how cognitive load and affective states evolve across the stages of information seeking. Through comprehensive signal analysis and machine learning, I showed that these mental and emotional shifts are reliably detectable from wearable data. I also released a public dataset, SenseSeek, to support future research. Study 2 — I investigated how cognitive dissonance — the discomfort that arises when information challenges our existing beliefs — manifests differently at each stage of information seeking with neurophysiological data and mixed-method.