The effect of displaying system confidence information on the usage of autonomous systems for non-specialist applications: a lab study

Abstract

Autonomous systems are designed to take actions on behalf of users, acting autonomously upon data from sensors or online sources. As such, the design of interaction mechanisms that enable users to understand the operation of autonomous systems and flexibly delegate or regain control is an open challenge for HCI. Against this background, in this paper we report on a lab study designed to investigate whether displaying the confidence of an autonomous system about the quality of its work, which we call its confidence information, can improve user acceptance and interaction with autonomous systems. The results demonstrate that confidence information encourages the usage of the autonomous system we tested, compared to a situation where such information is not available. Furthermore, an additional contribution of our work is the methodology we employ to study users' incentives to do work in collaboration with the autonomous system. In experiments comparing different incentive strategies, our results indicate that our translation of behavioural economics research methods to HCI can support the study of interactions with autonomous systems in the lab.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Sarvapali Ramchurn: orcid.org/0000-0001-9686-4302

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