International Journal of Human-Computer Studies最新文献

Achieving effective collaboration and trust has been shown to be harder for virtual vs. in-person teams. Related work has confirmed that introductions are a key mechanism to form trust in newly-formed teams. The rise of remote work necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for accelerating the development of effective collaboration in virtual teams. In response to this need, based on the research around introductions and trust in team settings, we have developed a novel approach for virtual introductions. This is what we term as asynchronous, semi-guided, professional introductions. Participants pre-record an introduction that uses a set of professionally-focused questions and watch these introductions prior to the meeting. Our study examines the impact of these introductions on virtual teams in three conditions: video, text, and no introduction. In this study, we used the Team Diagnostic Survey post-task completion to assess team effectiveness and interpersonal processes of 28 dyads. Thematic coding was used to collect dyads’ experience and engagement. The introduction conditions demonstrated significantly improved collaboration, effectiveness, and engagement amongst participants. Notably, the video condition was particularly well-received by participants and resulted in higher levels of engagement and effectiveness compared to the text and no introduction conditions. Ultimately, the use of these introductions led to a marked increase in trust and collaboration amongst participants. We reflect on the effects of this finding in the mainstream and propose further research to support newly-formed virtual dyadic teams to increase team effectiveness. This study contributes to the existing literature by introducing a novel asynchronous, semi-guided approach to virtual dyadic team introductions, offering insights crucial for contemporary remote work dynamics.

Technologies support our everyday lives, and to ensure that people are not routinely excluded they must be usable by the wider population. However, technologies are not commonly tested with participants from a range of backgrounds. This paper reports on interviews and roundtable discussions with people whose identities can be underrepresented in usability testing and usability researchers to discuss how equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) can be embedded in usability testing.

Key findings include (1) when people participate in research they need a sense of value, trust and agency, and (2) challenges for researchers for embedding EDI in usability testing include organisational pressures, stakeholder culture, getting guidance and recruiting who you need. Recommendations are made to researchers, and to the organisations that employ them. Additionally, we propose a research agenda for a community of users, creators of services and products, usability researchers, and all those advocating for EDI in usability research.

Misinformation is rampant on social media, and existing platform-supplied interventions offer limited effectiveness. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of credibility labels that dispute the accuracy of information when they are supplied by one’s peers at different levels of relationship closeness and political agreement. We investigate four variants of these labels using a 2 (strong vs. weak tie strength) x 2 (high vs. low political agreement) between-subjects factorial design. We find that credibility disputes raised by one’s co-partisans (peers with similar political beliefs) significantly reduced belief in misinformation, irrespective of one’s relationship closeness with the peer. Our findings also reveal that in contrast to prior literature, a peer’s knowledgeability may be more potent than trustworthiness in causing belief change, and that trust can sometimes manifest even in the credibility judgement of distant peers, when perceived to have expertise or a fact-checking tendency. We further highlight the dual nature of these credibility labels, discussing scenarios in which disputes by hyper-partisan members of the opposite party can enforce belief in misinformation. We conclude by discussing how peer-supplied credibility disputes can benefit social media, especially echo chambers with high political homophily, where disputes by a co-partisan may be met with less resistance and persuade significantly reduced belief in fake news.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of an example-based explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) interface on trust, understanding, and performance in highly-technical populations. XAI studies often focus on general users in low-risk domains. This study examined the impact of showing the closest matches from the training data from two classes on trust, understanding, and performance for highly-technical users in a high-risk domain. We found that providing example-based explanations significantly increased trust and understanding without decreasing performance. Showing the most similar examples from two classes increased trust more than showing examples from only one class. Participants did not treat different classes the same. The most important features for predicting how well an interface was understood were the helpfulness of the provided examples and the person's trust in the human-machine team. We found priming of highly-technical participants to be particularly important for running XAI studies to mitigate the fear of their jobs being impacted.

The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations worldwide to switch to remote work paradigms. This paper examines how users adapted to online meeting environments, specifically in the context of official council meetings at a Brazilian university. Transitioning from traditional in-person to virtual meeting platforms required re-evaluating participation dynamics, including how council members and the public interact in these spaces. We interviewed 19 council members who were used to participating in in-person deliberative public meetings, aiming to delve into their adaptation process, examining how individuals adjusted to the virtual meeting format and related challenges. Our findings show that online meetings broadened attendance and engagement but also introduced complexities with meeting protocols and personal attention. We discuss how participants navigated the nuances of online meeting formats, from managing technical issues to redefining public and private meeting boundaries. Our analysis suggests that user adaptation is multifaceted, encompassing the adoption of new technologies and modifications in communication strategies and meeting etiquette. Through this lens, we reflect on the essential role of user-centric approaches in designing and facilitating online meetings to enhance collaborative outcomes and mitigate the potential for breakdowns. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the resilience and flexibility of meeting cultures in response to unforeseen global changes.

The Proteus effect refers to the tendency for individuals to conform to the stereotypes related to the visual characteristics of the avatar used in a virtual environment. If the phenomenon has been widely observed, underlying mechanisms (e.g., self-perception, priming) and moderation factors, such as avatar embodiment, need confirmation. The sense of embodiment emerges when the properties of the avatar are processed in the same way as the properties of the biological body. The objective of the present study was, first, to investigate the effect of avatar embodiment on the Proteus effect related to the influence of an elderly avatar on motor imagery, and second, to examine the extent to which this relationship is explained by a change in self-perception. In two virtual reality studies, the agency and the self-location components of embodiment were manipulated through visuo-motor synchronization and visual perspective respectively. The time required to perform motor imagery displacements while being embodied (visuo-motor synchrony and first-person perspective) or not (visuo-motor asynchrony and/or third-person perspective) in an elderly avatar was measured. The results showed that the Proteus effect was not stronger the more participants embodied the elderly avatar, which does not support that embodiment moderates the Proteus effect. Moreover, analyses did not confirm that change in explicit self-perception mediates the relationship between embodiment and the Proteus effect. The Proteus effect is discussed in the light of the avatar identification process and the active-self account: crossover between these mechanisms could offer new insights into understanding the influence of avatars on individuals’ behavior.

Minor violations of traffic regulations are common today and partially socially accepted. Automated vehicles (AVs), however, will be obliged to keep to the letter of the law. This can lead to situations where user requests cause the AV to reach its legal boundaries, creating novel user-vehicle conflicts. To investigate whether traffic-violating driver interests are transferred to the automated context, we conducted an online survey with three conflict-prone scenarios (N=49). The results indicate that legally compliant AV behavior is desired but that users would intervene in the vehicle’s behavior to enforce interests. In a subsequent Virtual Reality study (N=30), we evaluated the effect of legal boundary-handling strategies (Responsibility and Control Shift, Responsibility Shift, No Shift) and other traffic participants’ violating traffic regulations on behavior, conflict, and trust in a legally conflict-prone parking scenario. Results show that conflict is perceived significantly higher in all strategies compared to the manual baseline, while situational trust in the vehicle is higher in the automated conditions but independent of the handling strategy.

Age factor is a significant barrier in adopting mobile banking mainly due to low competence in using the system and security concerns. Thus, this study presents a conversational artificial intelligence agent-based mobile banking app that is specially designed for seniors considering their needs and physical characteristics. Voice modality and lip-movement were identified as the important factors to improve seniors’ mobile banking service experience and the effect of them were empirically tested by conducting a controlled experiment with between-subject design. In total, 91 participants who were 55 years or older used the app to complete the given tasks of online banking. Results showed that those in the two voice modality conditions, compared to text agent condition, reported higher levels of trust, perceived ease of use, and social presence. The effect of lip movement of the agent also showed significant results in those three dependant variables. The result of mediation analysis revealed that agent's lip movement increased social presence and perceived ease of use, which further increased trust toward the agent. The results are meaningful especially because trust and perceived ease of use were listed as the main reason for not using online banking services among non-users. The implications of the study were discussed.

We study Congruent Indirect Touch (CIT) interaction in a desktop context. CIT only differs from direct touch in that the motor and display spaces are separated: touch occurs on the horizontal desk; while users’ visual focus is on a vertical display where small pointers show the position of the fingers. We introduce an accurate fingertip tracking approach based on optical tracking and fingertip modeling as a sphere. This allows updating the pointer when the finger is hovering above the surface and implementing an efficient CIT interaction. This interaction was evaluated in a longitudinal user study. Six participants with no experience with CIT performed target acquisitions on eight different days. Throughput was measured with CIT and mouse. In the last session, two participants had similar throughput with both interactions; the four others were notably more efficient with CIT. Averaged across all participants, throughput improved by 14%. This study promotes the study of CIT as a potential efficient replacement for the mouse on the desktop.

Social science experiments in virtual reality (VR) frequently manipulate the perspective from which a user views an avatar and the identity of an avatar to change participant perceptions and attitudes. However, avatar embodiment may also influence physical behaviors—i.e., the way participants move—during the VR experience. For example, users may shift their position to align with avatars they see from a first-person perspective, a phenomenon known as the self-follower effect. We conducted a between-subjects, pre-registered study to understand how common techniques such as manipulating perspective and appearance might affect participant movements while in VR. We demonstrate that even when participants do not have agency over their avatars' movements, viewing avatar movements influences their own actions, whether these are viewed from the first or the third-person perspective. These phenomena hold potential as interventions to prompt participant movements in other contexts.