Analyzing and Pinpointing Intellectual Approaches of Mental Logic, Mental Models and Reasoning Strategies During Users’ Information Seeking Process

Since information seeking behavior is a problem-solving process and includes different steps, users are influenced by their reasoning and thinking style during searching and making decisions at each stage of information seeking process, and they may repeat, change the search term, or perform a search many times until reaching the goal. Therefore, identifying users’ reasoning types at each stage of the information seeking process increases awareness about their mental challenges and the reasoning process that occur in their minds. Therefore, the purpose of writing this paper is to investigate, theoretically explain the role of reasoning in information seeking process in general and compare the position of the three intellectual approaches of mental logic, mental models and reasoning strategies and in the information seeking process in particular. In this research, the role of three thinking approaches (mental logic, mental models, and reasoning strategies) in the information seeking process was compared and based on that, the relative advantage of reasoning strategies in comparison with other two approaches was explained. The examination of different intellectual approaches shows that it is not possible to solve the problem by relying on one approach in the information seeking process, because the approach of mental logic and the use of logical rules can only be used in the stage of formulating different pieces of information or the stage of evaluating the results, while the examination of the mental models approach shows the application of this approach both in the stage of expressing the need, defining and understanding the problem, and in the stage of evaluating the results. In the meantime, the approach of reasoning strategies indicates that considering some reasoning strategies are based on logical rules and some of them are based on mental models, therefore, this approach is used in each of the stages of the information seeking process. The comparison of three thinking approaches (mental logic, mental models and reasoning strategies) showed that in the reasoning strategies approach, a wide range of strategies can be used to perform reasoning tasks and tasks that are not at the same level in terms of the application of logical rules. In other words, the intellectual approach of reasoning methods includes rule-based approaches (mental logic) or mental models in problem solving. In addition, in this approach, the syntactic and semantic structure as well as the content and context of the problem are taken into consideration, so compared to the other two approaches, the reasoning strategies approach can be considered as a suitable alternative for explaining and advancing the information seeking process.