The rapid growth of the number of mobile services provides enormous potential for mobile users in different contexts to find mobile information of interest.Mobile user preferences elicitation has been used as a valid means to ease the "mobile information overload" problem.Inspired by the model of level of processing and the theory of distributed cognition

a cognitive psychology-based approach to user preferences elicitation for mobile network services is proposed.It uses a six-tuple to describe the data structure of user preferences information

analyzes the level of processing of services for users to elicit context-free user preferences

then identifies valid types of contexts as well as their influences on user preferences

and finally elicits converged user preferences.Experimental comparisons of this approach against some baseline methods with a synthetic data set have been conducted

showing improvements in performance.