Publications

Publications / SAND Report

The Impact of Specificity on Human Interpretations of State Uncertainty

Matzen, Laura E.; Howell, Breannan C.; Trumbo, Michael C.

The goal of this project was test how different representations of state uncertainty impact human decision making. Across a series of experiments, we sought to answer fundamental questions about human cognitive biases and how they are impacted by visual and numerical information. The results of these experiments identify problems and pitfalls to avoid when for presenting algorithmic outputs that include state uncertainty to human decision makers. Our findings also point to important areas for future research that will enable system designers to minimize biases in human interpretation for the outputs of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced analytic systems.