Publications • Human-Centered Computing • Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

“The AI is uncertain, so am I. What now?”: Navigating Shortcomings of Uncertainty Representations in Human-AI Collaboration with Capability-focused Guidance

Study interface

Schäfer, Ulrike; Sipos, Lars; Müller-Birn, Claudia

ACM (Accepted) | 2025

Appeared in: (Accepted for) Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Issue CSCW1

(Accepted) Schäfer, U., Sipos, L., Müller-Birn, C. (2025) “The AI is uncertain, so am I. What now?”: Navigating Shortcomings of Uncertainty Representations in Human-AI Collaboration with Capability-focused Guidance. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 10 (CSCW), 48 pages.

As AI becomes increasingly relevant, especially in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, it is important to investigate which approaches can improve human-AI collaboration and, if so, why. Current research focuses primarily on technically available approaches, such as explainable AI (XAI), often overlooking human needs. This study bridges this gap by adopting a well-established technical approach - model uncertainty representations - by considering users' familiarity with the format and numeracy skills. Despite being provided with uncertainty representations, users may still struggle to handle uncertain decisions. Thus, we introduce an educational approach that communicates the capabilities of humans and the AI system to users, supplementing the uncertainty representations. We conducted a pre-registered, between-subjects user study to determine whether these approaches resulted in improved human-AI team performance, mediated by the user's mental model of the AI. Our findings indicate that solely providing uncertainty representations does not improve team performance or the user's mental model in comparison to only providing AI recommendations. However, incorporating capability-focused guidance alongside uncertainty representations significantly enhances correct self-reliance and, to some extent, overall team performance. Our additional exploratory analyses suggest that factors such as task uncertainty, case difficulty, and case type, rather than numeracy skills, the need for cognition or familiarity, can influence team performance. We discuss these factors in detail, provide practical implications, and suggest directions for further research. This work contributes to the CSCW discourse by demonstrating how technical approaches can be augmented with educational approaches to enhance human-AI collaboration in decision-making tasks.

Keywords: Human-AI interaction, AI Uncertainty, Guidance, Decision-making

Sensorimotor adaptation in virtual reality: Do instructions and body representation influence aftereffects?

Wähnert, Svetlana; Schäfer, Ulrike

Springer Nature | 2024-02

Appeared in: Virtual Reality Volume 28, article number 47, (2024)

Perturbations in virtual reality (VR) lead to sensorimotor adaptation during exposure, but also to aftereffects once the perturbation is no longer present. An experiment was conducted to investigate the impact of different task instructions and body representation on the magnitude and the persistence of these aftereffects. Participants completed the paradigm of sensorimotor adaptation in VR. They were assigned to one of three groups: control group, misinformation group or arrow group. The misinformation group and the arrow group were each compared to the control group to examine the effects of instruction and body representation. The misinformation group was given the incorrect instruction that in addition to the perturbation, a random error component was also built into the movement. The arrow group was presented a virtual arrow instead of a virtual hand. It was hypothesised that both would lead to a lower magnitude and persistence of the aftereffect because the object identity between hand and virtual representation would be reduced, and errors would be more strongly attributed to external causes. Misinformation led to lower persistence, while the arrow group showed no significant differences compared to the control group. The results suggest that information about the accuracy of the VR system can influence the aftereffects, which should be considered when developing VR instructions. No effects of body representation were found. One possible explanation is that the manipulated difference between abstract and realistic body representation was too small in terms of object identity.

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Aftereffects, Experiment

Identifying Explanation Needs of End-users: Applying and Extending the XAI Question Bank

Sipos, Lars; Schäfer, Ulrike; Glinka, Katrin; Müller-Birn, Claudia

New York: ACM | 2023

Appeared in: Proceedings of Mensch Und Computer 2023