Facilitating information search to support decision making is one of the core purposes of information technology. In both personal and workplace environments, advances in information technology and the availability of information have enabled people to perform much more search and access much more information for decision making than ever before. Because of this abundance of information, there is an increasing need to develop an improved understanding of how people stop search, since information available for most decisions is now almost infinite. Our goal in this paper is to further our understanding of information search and stopping, and we do so by examining the neurocorrelates of stopping information search. This is a process that involves both stopping the search and the decision to stop the search. We asked subjects to search for information about consumer products and to stop when they believed they had enough information to make a subsequent decision about whether to purchase those products while in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) chamber. Brain activation patterns revealed an extensive distributed network of areas that are engaged in the decision to stop searching for information that are not engaged in search itself, suggesting that stopping is a complex and cognitively demanding neurological activity. Implications for theory, particularly information overconsumption, and for IT design are discussed.

促进信息搜索以支持决策是信息技术的核心目的之一。在个人和工作环境中，信息技术的进步和信息的可用性使人们能够比以往进行更多的搜索和访问更多的信息以进行决策。由于信息量如此之多，人们越来越需要对人们如何停止前进有更好的了解。搜索，因为大多数决策可用的信息现在几乎是无限的。本文的目标是加深我们对信息搜索和停止的理解，我们通过检查停止信息搜索的神经相关性来做到这一点。此过程涉及停止搜索和决定停止搜索。我们要求受试者搜索有关消费产品的信息，并在他们认为自己有足够的信息时停止搜索，以便随后就是否在功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）室中购买这些产品做出决定。大脑激活模式揭示了一个广泛的分布区域网络，这些区域参与了决定停止搜索未参与搜索本身的信息的决定，这表明停止是一项复杂且需要认知的神经活动。讨论了对理论（特别是信息过度消费）和IT设计的影响。