Reicherts, Leon;
(2024)
Designing Cognitive ‘Copilots’: Augmenting Our Minds Through Prompting Conversational Interactions.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Natural language user interfaces (NLUIs) have become increasingly popular for a range of tasks and activities, given the interactive, adaptive, and contextual interactions they can offer. While the goal of many NLUIs is to make it easier for the user to request, find, or generate information or content to complete certain tasks more efficiently, it is argued here that they can also be effective at scaffolding people’s thinking while performing cognitive tasks. It is hypothesised that the way this can be achieved is by proactively asking people questions to engage them in reflective thinking about a task at hand. The focus in this thesis is on openended tasks that benefit from such reflective thinking, as it can enable people to discover alternative perspectives, approaches, and possibilities which can help to progress with the task. The NLUIs presented in this thesis are embedded into the interfaces used to perform different types of cognitive tasks and were thus named ‘cognitive co-pilots’. The tasks included a collaborative exploratory data analysis task, a complex decision-making task, and a creative three-dimensional drawing task. This PhD research explored the opportunities, as well as the challenges of ‘embedding’ such prompting co-pilots into these types of cognitive activities. It also examines the design parameters at the interface, such as the adequate timing, phrasing, and delivery of prompts – and how they can affect ongoing activities. The thesis reports five studies conducted on different types of proactive NLUIs and provides a novel way of conceptualising them in terms of how they can extend human cognition.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Designing Cognitive ‘Copilots’: Augmenting Our Minds Through Prompting Conversational Interactions |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10201669 |
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