Explanation strategies in humans versus current explainable artificial intelligence: Insights from image classification.

Explainable AI (XAI) methods provide explanations of AI models, but our understanding of how they compare with human explanations remains limited. Here, we examined human participants' attention strategies when classifying images and when explaining how they classified the images through eye‐trackin...

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Publicado en:British Journal of Psychology Vol. 117; no. 2; pp. 479 - 503
Autores principales: Qi, Ruoxi, Zheng, Yueyuan, Yang, Yi, Cao, Caleb Chen, Hsiao, Janet H.
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell May2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Explanation strategies in humans versus current explainable artificial intelligence: Insights from image classification.
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          Qi, Ruoxi
          Zheng, Yueyuan
          Yang, Yi
          Cao, Caleb Chen
          Hsiao, Janet H.
        affil:
          Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
          Huawei Research Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
          Big Data Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China
          Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China
      su:
        China
        Task performance
        Artificial intelligence
        Cell phones
        Attention
        Analysis of variance
        Research funding
        Corn
        Winter sports
        Portable computers
        T-test (Statistics)
        Tennis
        Multiple regression analysis
        Eye movement measurements
        Lemon
        Analysis of covariance
        Large-scale brain networks
        Concepts
        Visual perception
        Insects
        Mollusks
        Horses
        Mushrooms
        Transducers
      sug:
        subj:
          Task performance
          Artificial intelligence
          Cell phones
          Attention
          Analysis of variance
          China
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          Semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing
          Electronic components, navigational and communications equipment and supplies merchant wholesalers
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          Radio and Television Broadcasting and Wireless Communications Equipment Manufacturing
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          Research funding
          Corn
          Winter sports
          Portable computers
          T-test (Statistics)
          Tennis
          Multiple regression analysis
          Eye movement measurements
          Lemon
          Analysis of covariance
          Large-scale brain networks
          Concepts
          Visual perception
          Insects
          Mollusks
          Horses
          Mushrooms
          Transducers
      keyword:
        EMHMM
        explainable AI
        explanation
        eye movements
        image classification
        text analysis
        EMHMM
        explainable AI
        explanation
        eye movements
        image classification
        text analysis
      ab: Explainable AI (XAI) methods provide explanations of AI models, but our understanding of how they compare with human explanations remains limited. Here, we examined human participants' attention strategies when classifying images and when explaining how they classified the images through eye‐tracking and compared their attention strategies with saliency‐based explanations from current XAI methods. We found that humans adopted more explorative attention strategies for the explanation task than the classification task itself. Two representative explanation strategies were identified through clustering: One involved focused visual scanning on foreground objects with more conceptual explanations, which contained more specific information for inferring class labels, whereas the other involved explorative scanning with more visual explanations, which were rated higher in effectiveness for early category learning. Interestingly, XAI saliency map explanations had the highest similarity to the explorative attention strategy in humans, and explanations highlighting discriminative features from invoking observable causality through perturbation had higher similarity to human strategies than those highlighting internal features associated with higher class score. Thus, humans use both visual and conceptual information during explanation, which serve different purposes, and XAI methods that highlight features informing observable causality match better with human explanations, potentially more accessible to users.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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