Cognitive Engagement
- Cognitive effort is a form of labor, and unsurprisingly, people tend to favor less demanding forms of cognition and other mental shortcuts [18, 51].
- Unfortunately, this human tendency can lead to unintended or dangerous outcomes because humans are susceptible to a wide variety of cognitive biases such as confirmation bias
- Confirmation bias [41]
- refers to the interpreting of new evidence in ways that confirm one’s existing beliefs
- For XAI, this manifests as practitioners only superficially examining explanations instead of digging deeply, leading to over-trust, misuse, and a lack of accurate understanding of the outputs [31]
- Forcing users to cognitively engage through some small task before showing a system’s output yielded the highest performance in a comparative study [21]
- Train conductors in Japan famously point and call out important information on their journeys—a cognitive forcing method which has reduced human errors by nearly 85% [45].
- Realistically, how much will users actually cognitively engage with the magnitude of generated outputs to ensure that they are correct and aligned with their intentions?