Visual Cues: Changing how people perceive smart systems' performance

Abstract

In this thesis, we report twelve studies. In more detail, four lab studies and eight follow-up studies on the crowd-sourcing platform designed to investigate the potential of visual cues to influence users' perception of three smart systems: a vacuum robot, a handwriting recognition and a part-of-speech tagging system. The findings from the first three studies indicate that physical motion cues can influence people's perception of vacuum robots' performance. The subsequent three studies indicate that indeed animation cues can influence a participant's perception of handwriting recognition and part-of-speech tagging systems' performance. The subsequent three studies, designed to try and identify an explanation of this effect, suggest that it is related to the participants' mental model of the smart system. The last three studies were designed to characterise the effect more in detail, and they revealed that different detail of animation does not seem to create substantial differences and that the effect persists even when the system's performance decreases, but only when the difference in performance level between the systems being compared is small. Finally, the last study focused on analysing the effect of varying the speed of the animation, and we found that the effect persists even the variation of speed in the animation.

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

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