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January 2012 - November 2015
Publications
Publications (70)
Zusammenfassung: Generative KI (Künstliche Intelligenz) hat mit der Veröffentlichung von Transformer-Modellen wie GPT enorme Entwicklungssprünge vollzogen. Dieses Positionspapier identifiziert zwei Kerneigenschaften generativer KI: die Breite der Einsatzfelder sowie die Fähigkeit, menschenähnlichen Output zu kreieren. Darauf aufbauend diskutiert di...
Many studies suggest that social media users prefer information that aligns with their worldview (congeniality bias). However, while this bias has been shown for information consumption behaviour (selective exposure), it is unknown whether the preference for like-minded content also characterizes social media interactions in which users reply to pr...
We explored the addition bias, a cognitive tendency to prefer adding elements over removing them to alter an initial state or structure, by conducting four preregistered experiments examining the problem-solving behavior of both humans and OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model. The experiments involved 588 participants from the U.S. and 680 iteration...
Phenomena like echo chambers and societal polarization have often been linked to an individual preference for like-minded information (selective exposure). This view has been challenged recently: behavior on comment sections in online forums suggests the opposite dynamic, with users more likely to reply to attitudinally uncongenial content. Three e...
Misinformation continues to pose a substantial societal problem, but the measurement of misinformation susceptibility has often been done using non-validated tests. Furthermore, research shows that misleading content (implied misinformation) is much more common than outright false content (explicit misinformation). However, there is very little res...
Surveys worldwide show that the public perceives artificial intelligence (AI) as a double-edged sword: A risk and an opportunity. However, how this ambiguous perception of AI is related to people’s willingness to use AI-based applications has yet to be investigated. To this end, two online experiments were conducted, including two samples, N = 246...
Research on selective exposure typically yields a congeniality bias, a preference to choose attitudinally congenial (vs. uncongenial) information for consumption. Recent work has proposed selective response which yields an uncongeniality bias, a preference to choose uncongenial information for replying in social media contexts. Three studies (total...
Online phenomena like echo chambers and polarization are believed to be driven by humans’ penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behavior, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online behavior...
Surveys around the world show that the public perceives artificial intelligence (AI) as a double-edged sword: As a risk but also as an opportunity. However, if and how this ambiguous perception of AI relates to people’s willingness to use it has yet to be investigated. Thus, the present research investigated how people’s risk and opportunity percep...
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly used in everyday life. Whereas some of them are widely accepted (e.g., automatically compiled playlists), others are highly controversial (e.g., use of AI in the classroom). While public discourse is dominated by perceptions of the risks associated with AI, we take a fundamentally different...
A substantial number of citizens in democratic countries believe in a political media dictate, the false assumption that governments decide what mainstream and flagship journalistic outlets may report or not. Two survey studies using national German samples (N= 590 and N = 1067) revealed that more than one third of the adult population believes in...
Online phenomena like echo chambers and belief polarisation are believed to be driven by humans’ penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behaviour, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online b...
Prior research has indicated that both attitudinal homogeneity of communication networks (“echo chambers”) and attitudinal heterogeneity of communication networks (“adversarial debates”) can lead to attitude polarization. The present paper argues that communication in both echo chambers and adversarial debates is dominated by network negativity, a...
Prior research has indicated that both attitudinal homogeneity of communication networks ("echo chambers") and attitudinal heterogeneity of communication networks ("adversarial debates") can lead to attitude polarization. The present paper argues that communication in both echo chambers and adversarial debates is dominated by network negativity, a...
Zusammenfassung
In vielen Bereichen ist die Leistung von Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) der Leistung von Menschen mittlerweile ebenbürtig oder überlegen. Dies gilt vor allem in Bereichen, in denen Regeln angewendet oder erkannt werden müssen. Dennoch sollten diese Fortschritte nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass es noch immer gravierende Defizite in d...
When people navigate through their informational environments, they often come across information that is discrepant from their knowledge or their attitudes, and consequently experience cognitive conflict. This chapter reviews findings and theories about cognitive conflicts from the learning sciences and from social psychology. While cognitive conf...
This chapter deals with the question of how people use digital technologies in order to get a better understanding of the world surrounding them, thus offering a cognitively inspired perspective to the current digital transformation of society. After delineating the importance of information and information processing, we introduce the concept of i...
The present study aims to empiricaly demonstrate the viability and benefits of an awareness-based approach to diversify knowledge between potential learning partners. Groups of four learners studied lesson material on biology. After a knowledge test, the groups were to form collaborative learning dyads. Based on the test, a novel knowledge discrepa...
Knowledge exchange, defined as interpersonal interactions that change knowledge in the heads and/or knowledge in the world, is a topic of interest in many research fields. This chapter outlines a conceptual framework which captures many variables that play a role in knowledge exchange. The conceptual framework draws a distinction between input vari...
A growing literature suggests that situational cues have a strong influence on behavior, especially online. Here we conducted a within subjects experiment where participants saw 16 forum discussion posts on the topic of alternative medicine, twice. The participant’s reactions to conflicting information are modulated by changing the possible afforda...
Despite their important position in the research environment, there is a growing theoretical uncertainty concerning what research metrics indicate (e.g., quality, impact, attention). Here we utilize the same tools used to study latent traits like Intelligence and Personality to get a quantitative understanding of what over 20 common research metric...
This book provides a multidisciplinary view into how individuals and groups interact with the information environments that surround them. The book discusses how informational environments shape our daily lives, and how digital technologies can improve the ways in which people make use of informational environments. It presents the research and out...
Higher education in academic fields is often quite disconnected from professional practice. Deeper learning approaches aim at closing the gap between the way that students learn and the affordances of complex problems in their environment. This chapter deconstructs the term deeper learning, identifying its focus on problems, on declarative knowledg...
In the computer-supported collaborative learning domain the Content-based Knowledge Awareness approach has been established as a reliable way of improving knowledge exchange within transiently collaborating online groups. On this paradigm group members are given insight into the entirety of each other’s task-related knowledge content at the outset...
Spreading news in Web 2.0 is easy and ubiquitous, especially in Twitter via retweeting. However, while some news develops viral power, other remains disregarded. The paper presents two laboratory experiments about potentially influencing criteria on retweeting. Study 1 investigated whether content criteria (informational value) and context criteria...
As discussions in online forums can become quite large, participants must be highly selective in their reading behavior. Standard, chronological displays of discussions provide little guidance in how to find valuable content. An experimental study tested whether a group awareness tool can support individual navigation and subsequent learning within...
In his book “Cognition in the Wild”, Hutchins (1995) invites his readers to scan their immediate environment for objects that were not produced through collaborative efforts of several people, and remarks that the only object in his personal environment that passed this test was a small pebble on his desk. In fact, it is remarkable how our daily li...
Der technologische Fortschritt und die Globalisierung haben die Art und Weise verändert, wie Lernen in Organisationen stattfindet. Viele Trainings werden nicht mehr in Präsenzveranstaltungen angeboten, sondern vermehrt medienbasiert durchgeführt. Dabei ist es häufig der Fall, dass sich die Trainingsteilnehmer nicht an einem Ort, sondern virtuell ve...
With the advent of Web 2.0 applications, practices of news spreading have changed. Now, not only journalists but also average Internet users are able to spread news. This paper examines criteria that influence the forwarding of information in microblogging systems such as Twitter. To test whether and how two different kinds of criteria (contextual...
Critical thinking requires knowledge about the diversity of viewpoints on controversial issues. However, the diversity of perspectives often remains unexploited: Learners prefer preference-consistent over preference-inconsistent information, a phenomenon called confirmation bias. This chapter attempts to introduce how recommender systems can be use...
This paper investigates users' intentions to reply and their actual replies in an informal learning online discussion. Based on the literature, it was expected that two factors determine whether users will reply to a discussion post: a) cognitive conflict between the attitude expressed in a post and a user's attitude; b) degree of emotionality of a...
Awareness tools using visualized ratings of other people can help recipients to find their way in crowded information spaces. This article reports on a laboratory experiment that investigates how the design of an awareness tool impacts the navigation behavior of recipients within an online discussion forum. In the experiment, 127 participants read...
When a diversity of viewpoints on controversial issues is available, learners prefer information that is consistent with their prior preferences. Following previous findings, preference-inconsistent recommendations can be used to overcome this bias. Two studies investigated the role of two potential moderators (prior knowledge; cooperation vs. comp...
Being aware of someone else's existing knowledge is a prerequisite to effectively adapting an explanation to that person's learning needs. However, such knowledge awareness introduces the potential for motivated self-evaluation based on relative knowledge, that is, for social comparison. Because favorable social comparisons are actively defended, w...
The Web is a perfect backdrop for opinion formation as a multitude of different opinions is publicly available. However, the different opinions often remain unexploited: Learners prefer preference-consistent over preference-inconsistent information, a phenomenon called confirmation bias. Two experiments were designed to test whether technologies su...
This paper explores the potentials of recommender systems for learning from a psychological point of view. It is argued that main features of recommender systems (collective responsibility, collective intelligence, user control, guidance, personalization) fit very well to principles in the learning sciences. However, recommender systems should not...
Recommender systems have their origin in e-commerce. In this domain the users are meant to like the recommended information. This preference-consistency is not adequate or even desirable for all domains where recommender systems are implemented. One key issue for opinion formation and informed decision making is to be aware of more than one's own p...
Computer-mediated collaboration is not in and of itself a beneficial setting for learning. Environments for computer-mediated collaboration need to trigger learning-productive interactions. In this paper, we propose to implement tools providing group knowledge awareness (GKA), i.e., information about collaborators’ knowledge. GKA is typically restr...
Group awareness has become an important concept since it was introduced into the field of computer-supported collaborative learning. This paper discusses current trends and future directions in this research field. It is argued that the development and implementation of tools should be complemented by systematic explorations into the mechanisms tha...
Awareness of the knowledge of learning partners is not always sufficiently available in collaborative learning scenarios. To compensate, the authors propose to provide collaborators with partner knowledge awareness by means of a visualization tool. Partner knowledge awareness can be used to adapt messages toward the partner. This study investigated...
In collaboration, group knowledge awareness (i.e. being informed about the partners' knowledge) is used to effectively communicate and to efficiently coordinate interaction. Computer-mediated collaboration impairs the establishment of group knowledge awareness. Technological support for group knowledge awareness can compensate for this shortcoming...
In this paper, a specific group awareness approach for CSCL settings, namely knowledge awareness, is presented. We classify knowledge awareness in relation to already well-established concepts like shared mental models, common ground, and transactive memory system in order to provide a comprehensive definition of this approach. The functionality of...
SCAN tools (Social and Cognitive Awareness and Navigation tools) inform participants about social and/or cognitive variables with respect to a group and its members. This paper describes how SCAN tools facilitate and "institutionalize" the natural processes of becoming aware about social and cognitive variables, thereby leading to adaptive behavior...
Knowledge convergence is at the heart of even very different approaches to collaborative learning. Recent empirical work revealed that knowledge convergence falls behind the expectations because only modest amount of shared knowledge could be found. We investigate knowledge awareness as a method to foster the emergence of knowledge convergence in a...
How can knowledge exchange in computer networks be meaningfully supported? Studies offer insight into the possibilities and risks associated with network-based group communication, the success of which does not depend on the medium alone
This paper provides a selective review of the emerging research field of net-based knowledge communication in groups. The review is conceptualized around three problems that designers of net-based knowledge communication will face (cluttering of content, lack of interpersonal information, and lack of sequential structure), and provides examples of...
Higher education is increasingly realized by net-based scenarios often incorporating collaborative activities. This is accompanied with specific benefits but also constraints. In computer-mediated peer-tutoring for example it is more difficult to construct mutual models, thus impairing collaborators grounding, audience design and coordination. In t...
This paper describes the development of augmented group awareness tools that take mutual user ratings of their online discussion
contributions as input, aggregate these data, and visually feed these data back to the members in real time, thereby informing
participants about how the group as a whole perceives their contributions. A specific group a...
Wie kann der Wissensaustausch in Computernetzen sinnvoll unterstützt werden? Neue Studien geben Einblick in die Chancen und Risiken netzbasierter Kommunikation in Gruppen, deren Gelingen nicht nur vom Medium abhängt
Zusammenfassung. Die Eingabe von Information in eine geteilte Datenbank stellt eine spezifische Form des Offentlichen-Gut-Dilemmas dar. Vorgestellt wird ein computerbasiertes Szenario, das diese Merkmale abbildet und eine experimentelle Untersuchung des Datenbank-Dilemmas ermoglicht. Darin wird untersucht, inwiefern ein Feedback uber die Anzahl der...
Two new research programs which are funded by the German Science Foundation are aimed at establishing cognitive media psychology in Germany. The main question of the thematic research program "Net-based Knowledge Communication in Groups" concerns the new forms of communication using net-based technologies and their effective use for the exchange an...
Tübingen, Universiẗat, Diss., 2001 (Nicht für den Austausch).
Knowledge exchange via shared databases creates a social dilemma where people try to benefit from others’ contributions without
having any costs. A person’s tendency to withhold information can be interpreted as a kind of free riding. An experimental
setting is presented where the dilemma can be quantified. A study with 166 subjects shows that thre...