The Influence of Adapting an Agent’s Explanation Style to a Human Team Leader Role on Human-Agent Teamwork during a Simulated Search and Rescue Task

Master thesis (2022)

Authors

Contributors

M.L. Tielman (mentor)
R.S. Verhagen (mentor)
M.A. Neerincx (graduation committee)
Pablo Cesar (graduation committee)

Degree granting institution

Delft University of Technology

Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Ryan Kap
Search and rescue User-aware XAI Human-agent teamwork Human-robot teamwork Explainable AI Explainability Explanation styles User-study Personalised explanations
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

18-10-2022

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Communication is one of the main challenges in Human-Agent Teams (HATs). An important aspect of communication in HATs is the use of explanation styles. This thesis examines the influence of an explainable agent adapting its explanation style to a supervising human team leader on team performance, trust, situation awareness, collaborative fluency, explanation satisfaction, understandability, and user-awareness. To perform a simulated Search And Rescue (SAR) task, a HAT is designed. With this design, a pre-study is then conducted using a questionnaire to discover the best-ranked explanation styles in the most important situations of the SAR task. Next, the user-study is carried out with 46 participants, using the HAT design and analysed data from the pre-study. There are two conditions: the agent adapting the explanation style to the human team leader and the baseline condition where the explanation style is randomised. The results show that the subjective measurements of trust, understandability, explanation satisfaction, and perceived user-awareness are significantly higher in the adaptive agent condition group. The same cannot be concluded for objective measurements such as team performance and situation awareness.