This study provides ERP and oscillatory dynamics data associated with the comprehension of narratives involving counterfactual events. Participants were given short stories describing an initial situation ("Marta wanted to plant flowers in her garden...."), followed by a critical sentence describing a new situation in either a factual ("Since she found a spade, she started to dig a hole") or counterfactual format ("If she had found a spade, she would have started to dig a hole"), and then a continuation sentence that was either related to the initial situation ("she bought a spade") or to the new one ("she planted roses"). The ERPs recorded for the continuation sentences related to the initial situation showed larger negativity after factuals than after counterfactuals, suggesting that the counterfactual's presupposition - the events did not occur - prevents updating the here-and-now of discourse. By contrast, continuation sentences related to the new situation elicited similar ERPs under both factual and counterfactual contexts, suggesting that counterfactuals also activate momentarily an alternative "as if" meaning. However, the reduction of gamma power following counterfactuals, suggests that the "as if" meaning is not integrated into the discourse, nor does it contribute to semantic unification processes.
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In this paper, we explore the design of web-based advice robots to enhance users' confidence in acting upon the provided advice. Drawing from research on algorithm acceptance and explainable AI, we hypothesise four design principles that may encourage interactivity and exploration, thus fostering users' confidence to act. Through a value-oriented prototype experiment and value-oriented semi-structured interviews, we tested these principles, confirming three of them and identifying an additional principle. The four resulting principles: (1) put context questions and resulting advice on one page and allow live, iterative exploration, (2) use action or change oriented questions to adjust the input parameters, (3) actively offer alternative scenarios based on counterfactuals, and (4) show all options instead of only the recommended one(s), appear to contribute to the values of agency and trust. Our study integrates the Design Science Research approach with a Value Sensitive Design approach.
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Modern safety thinking and models focus more on systemic factors rather than simple cause-effect attributions of unfavourable events on the behaviour of individual system actors. This study concludes previous research during which we had traced practices of new safety thinking practices (NSTPs) in aviation investigation reports by using an analysis framework that includes nine relevant approaches and three safety model types mentioned in the literature. In this paper, we present the application of the framework to 277 aviation reports which were published between 1999 and 2016 and were randomly selected from the online repositories of five aviation authorities. The results suggested that all NSTPs were traceable across the sample, thus followed by investigators, but at different extents. We also observed a very low degree of using systemic accident models. Statistical tests revealed differences amongst the five investigation authorities in half of the analysis framework items and no significant variation of frequencies over time apart from the Safety-II aspect. Although the findings of this study cannot be generalised due to the non-representative sample used, it can be assumed that the so-called new safety thinking has been already attempted since decades and that recent efforts to communicate and foster the corresponding aspects through research and educational means have not yet yielded the expected impact. The framework used in this study can be applied to any industry sector by using larger samples as a means to investigate attitudes of investigators towards safety thinking practices and respective reasons regardless of any labelling of the former as “old” and “new”. Although NSTPs are in the direction of enabling fairer and more in-depth analyses, when considering the inevitable constraints of investigations, it is more important to understand the perceived strengths and weaknesses of each approach from the viewpoint of practitioners rather than demonstrating a judgmental approach in favour or not of any investigation practice.
