Tell Me More?: The Effects of Mental Model Soundness on Personalizing an Intelligent Agent

Kulesza, T., Stumpf, S. , Burnett, M. and Kwan, I. (2012) Tell Me More?: The Effects of Mental Model Soundness on Personalizing an Intelligent Agent. In: SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12), Austin, TX, USA, 05-10 May 2012, pp. 1-10. ISBN 9781450310154 (doi: 10.1145/2207676.2207678)

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Abstract

What does a user need to know to productively work with an intelligent agent? Intelligent agents and recommender systems are gaining widespread use, potentially creating a need for end users to understand how these systems operate in order to fix their agent's personalized behavior. This paper explores the effects of mental model soundness on such personalization by providing structural knowledge of a music recommender system in an empirical study. Our findings show that participants were able to quickly build sound mental models of the recommender system's reasoning, and that participants who most improved their mental models during the study were significantly more likely to make the recommender operate to their satisfaction. These results suggest that by helping end users understand a system's reasoning, intelligent agents may elicit more and better feedback, thus more closely aligning their output with each user's intentions.

Item Type:Conference Proceedings
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Stumpf, Dr Simone
Authors: Kulesza, T., Stumpf, S., Burnett, M., and Kwan, I.
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
ISBN:9781450310154

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