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.