The Influence of Information Sharing on the Predictability of the Human to an Agent

Abstract

Mutual predictability shows itself as a contributing factor to mutual trust and is known to improve the effectiveness in a human-agent teamwork setting. As team members communicate to coordinate the team through the task, the question arises as to what information the human should share to be predictable to an agent. To experiment with measuring the predictability, defined as to what extent the agent can anticipate the actions of the human, we used the Blocks World for Teams (BW4T) task. The two information types shared are intentions and world knowledge. The predictability is evaluated in the background by the agent logging, with automatic help from the human agent, a sequence containing the human performed actions. The agent can assign 2 probabilities to a human performed action. The first indicates with what probability the agent could say the human chose this action. The second indicates with what probability the agent could say this action led to this outcome. These probabilities then vary based on whether the information sent beforehand implied this action. The experiment has 4 different cases: sharing no information, sharing intentions, sharing world knowledge, and sharing both types. It is shown that sharing intentions contributes the most to higher predictability, due to these messages being the most effective at implying the future action of the human. World knowledge and sharing both types have less effect on predictability. We speculate that this is because of the larger amount of messages to share as well as when to share them, which overloads the human.