Recommender systems have their origin in e-commerce. In this domain the users are meant to like the recommended information. This preference-consistency is not adequate or even desirable for all domains where recommender systems are implemented. One key issue for opinion formation and informed decision making is to be aware of more than one's own perspective. However, information search is often biased, because confirming information is favored over opposing information. Therefore it would be useful to recommend information that is inconsistent to users' prior perspective to help overcome this bias. The present paper deals with an online experiment aimed at investigating the effects of preference-consistent compared to preference-inconsistent recommendations on information selection and evaluation. Results showed a significant reduction of confirmation bias in the condition with preference-inconsistent recommendations. However, participants prefer preference-consistent recommendations in terms of global, cognitive and affective evaluations. We discuss the impact of these findings for application.

Online real/virtual classrooms/schools will play a more important role in the society of the future. Especially, an anytime/anywhere learning environment, which allows learners to participate in a classroom via networks, is one of the most focused theme of this research field. In such a trend of these networked learning environments, the authors have already proposed a new concept for the asynchronous virtual classroom that combines online learning materials with both asynchronous communication tools and software agents. The software agents, which are simulated classmates in a classroom situation, act for real learners by means of utilizing past activities of past learners. In addition to such agents' behavior as semi-real classmates, they could be configured as purely virtual classmates by a lecturer, too. Now that they reconsidered and reconfigured a flexible architecture for software agents, this paper reports its basic design and an application for agent-based classmates in asynchronous learning scenario.

In analysing action generation in technical system control we differentiate between a purely cognitive stage of pre-actional decision-making and an action-related cognitive-physical stage of action planning and plan execution. This study investigates the impact of interface-induced handling requirements on the action-related processes in the domain of artificial respiration in intensive care. Thirty-two novice and experienced intensive care nurses had to solve three realistic control tasks on two types of respiration unit equipped either with an ‘analogue’ or with a ‘digital’ user interface. The quality of the novices’ plan execution and—unexpectedly— action planning, too, decreased when working on the ‘digital’ interface. Interface-induced handling requirements obviously have an important influence on the usability of technical systems not only on a purely cognitive level, but also on the action-related level.