EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches are used to bring transparency to machine learning and artificial intelligence models, and hence, improve the decision-making process for their end-users. While these methods aim to improve human understanding and their mental models, cognitive biases can still influence a user's mental model and decision-making in ways that system designers do not anticipate. This paper presents research on cognitive biases due to ordering effects in intelligent systems. We conducted a controlled user study to understand how the order of observing system weaknesses and strengths can affect the user's mental model, task performance, and reliance on the intelligent system, and we investigate the role of explanations in addressing this bias. Using an explainable video activity recognition tool in the cooking domain, we asked participants to verify whether a set of kitchen policies are being followed, with each policy focusing on a weakness or a strength. We controlled the order of the policies and the presence of explanations to test our hypotheses. Our main finding shows that those who observed system strengths early-on were more prone to automation bias and made significantly more errors due to positive first impressions of the system, while they built a more accurate mental model of the system competencies. On the other hand, those who encountered weaknesses earlier made significantly fewer errors since they tended to rely more on themselves, while they also underestimated model competencies due to having a more negative first impression of the model. Our work presents strong findings that aim to make intelligent system designers aware of such biases when designing such tools.

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Machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms can assist human decision making and analysis tasks. While such technology shows promise, willingness to use and rely on intelligent systems may depend on whether people can trust and understand them. To address this issue, researchers have explored the use of explainable interfaces that attempt to help explain why or how a system produced the output for a given input. However, the effects of meaningful and meaningless explanations (determined by their alignment with human logic) are not properly understood, especially with users who are non-experts in data science. Additionally, we wanted to explore how explanation inclusion and level of meaningfulness would affect the user’s perception of accuracy. We designed a controlled experiment using an image classification scenario with local explanations to evaluate and better understand these issues. Our results show that whether explanations are human-meaningful can significantly affect perception of a system’s accuracy independent of the actual accuracy observed from system usage. Participants significantly underestimated the system’s accuracy when it provided weak, less human-meaningful explanations. Therefore, for intelligent systems with explainable interfaces, this research demonstrates that users are less likely to accurately judge the accuracy of algorithms that do not operate based on human-understandable rationale.

Mixed-initiative systems allow users to interactively provide feedback to potentially improve system performance. Human feedback can correct model errors and update model parameters to dynamically adapt to changing data. Additionally, many users desire the ability to have a greater level of control and fix perceived flaws in systems they rely on. However, how the ability to provide feedback to autonomous systems influences user trust is a largely unexplored area of research. Our research investigates how the act of providing feedback can affect user understanding of an intelligent system and its accuracy. We present a controlled experiment using a simulated object detection system with image data to study the effects of interactive feedback collection on user impressions. The results show that providing human-in-the-loop feedback lowered both participants’ trust in the system and their perception of system accuracy, regardless of whether the system accuracy improved in response to their feedback. These results highlight the importance of considering the effects of allowing end-user feedback on user trust when designing intelligent systems.

Domain-specific intelligent systems are meant to help system users in their decision-making process. Many systems aim to simultaneously support different users with varying levels of domain expertise, but prior domain knowledge can affect user trust and confidence in detecting system errors. While it is also known that user trust can be influenced by first impressions with intelligent systems, our research explores the relationship between ordering bias and domain expertise when encountering errors in intelligent systems. In this paper, we present a controlled user study to explore the role of domain knowledge in establishing trust and susceptibility to the influence of first impressions on user trust. Participants reviewed an explainable image classifier with a constant accuracy and two different orders of observing system errors (observing errors in the beginning of usage vs. in the end). Our findings indicate that encountering errors early-on can cause negative first impressions for domain experts, negatively impacting their trust over the course of interactions. However, encountering correct outputs early helps more knowledgable users to dynamically adjust their trust based on their observations of system performance. In contrast, novice users suffer from over-reliance due to their lack of proper knowledge to detect errors.