ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- Creators: Cooke, Nancy J.
Description
The implementation of chatbots in customer service is widely prevalent in today’s world with insufficient research to appropriately refine all of their conversational abilities. Chatbots are favored for their ability to handle simple and typical requests made by users, but chatbots have proven to be prone to conversational breakdowns. The study researched how the use of repair strategies to combat conversational breakdowns in a simple versus complex task setting affected user experience. Thirty participants were collected and organized into six different groups in a two by three between subjects factorial design. Participants were assigned one of two tasks (simple or complex) and one of three repair strategies (repeat, confirmation, or options). A Wizard-of-Oz approach was used to simulate a chatbot that participants interacted with to complete a task in a hypothetical setting. Participants completed the task with this researcher-controlled chatbot as it intentionally failed the conversation multiple times, only to repair it with a repair strategy. Participants recorded their user experience regarding the chatbot afterwards. An Analysis of Covariance statistical test was run with task duration being a covariate variable. Findings indicate that the simple task difficulty was significant in improving the user experience that participants recorded whereas the particular repair strategy had no effect on the user experience. This indicates that simpler tasks lead to improved positive user experience and the more time that is spent on a task, the less positive the user experience. Overall, results associated with the effects of task difficulty and repair strategies on user experience were only partially consistent with previous literature.
ContributorsRios, Aaron (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Gutzwiller, Robert S. (Committee member) / Chiou, Erin K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Team communication facilitates team coordination strategies and situations, and how teammates perceive one another. In human-machine teams, these perceptions affect how people trust and anthropomorphize their machine counterparts, which in turn affects future team communication, forming a feedback loop. This thesis investigates how personifying and objectifying contents in human-machine team communication relate to team performance and perceptions in a simulated remotely piloted aircraft system task environment. A total of 46 participants grouped into teams of two were assigned unique roles and teamed with a synthetic pilot agent that in reality was a trained confederate following a script. Quantities of verbal personifications and objectifications were compared to questionnaire responses about participants’ perceived trust and anthropomorphism of the synthetic pilot, as well as team performance. It was hypothesized that verbal personifications would positively correlate with reflective trust, anthropomorphism, and team performance, and that verbal objectifications would negatively correlate with the same measures. It was also predicted that verbal personifications would decrease over time as human teammates interact more with the machine teammate, and that verbal objectifications would increase. Verbal personifications were not found to be correlated with trust and anthropomorphism outside of perceptions related to gender, albeit patterns of change in the navigator’s personifications coincided with a co-calibration of trust among the navigator and the photographer. Results supported the prediction that verbal objectifications are negatively correlated with trust and anthropomorphism of a teammate. Significant relationships between verbal personifications and objectifications and team performance were not found. This study provides support to the notion that people verbally personify machines to ease communication when necessary, and that the same processes that underlie tendencies to personify machines may be reciprocally related to those that influence team trust. Overall, this study provides evidence that personifying and objectifying language in human-machine team communication is a viable candidate for measuring the perceptions and states of teams, even in highly restricted communication environments.
ContributorsCohen, Myke C. (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Chiou, Erin K. (Committee member) / Amazeen, Polemnia G. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022