Figure 3: XAI Users and Development Timeline

Psychological Models of Explanation

The program structure anticipated the need for a grounded psychological understanding of explanation. One team was selected to summarize current psychological theories of explanation to assist the XAI developers and the evaluation team. This work began with an extensive literature survey on the psychology of explanation and previous work on explainability in AI (…reference for IHMC literature survey). Originally, this team was asked to (1) produce a summary of current theories of explanation, (2) develop a computational model of explanation from those theories; and (3) validate the computational model against the evaluation results from the XAI developers. Developing computational models proved to be a bridge too far, but the team did gain a deep understanding of the area and successfully produced descriptive models. These descriptive models were critical to supporting the effective evaluation approaches, which involved carefully designed user studies, carried out in accordance with DoD human subject research guidelines. Figure 2 illustrates a top-level descriptive model of the XAI explanation process.