arXiv subjects

Morita Tarvirdians

Publications and source records attributed to Morita Tarvirdians.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Why This and Not That? A Collaborative Reflection Approach for Understanding Thought Coverage in Decision Making Support Dialog

Conversational agents that support reflection for decision-making often rely on adaptive dialog policies that map observed user behavior to actions such as probing, deepening, or redirecting. Yet the same pattern can reflect a range of different reasons such as deliberate prioritisation or limited self-access. By modeling the observable pattern rather than the user's reason for it, current policies risk premature assumptions about the user state and inappropriate next actions. To address this gap, we introduce a human-centered method for surfacing this hidden inference step. In a user study with 62 users and 232 collaborative moments, we pause a reflection-support agent when it would normally redirect the conversation, surface its observation, and ask users to interpret the pattern and decide how to proceed. We derive a taxonomy of nine interpretation categories and show that similar reflective states can call for substantially different follow-up actions. Our findings challenge the assumption that adaptive dialog policies can rely on observable behavior alone, and suggest how user-provided interpretations can inform more appropriate conversational actions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Reflecti-Mate: A Conversational Agent for Adaptive Decision-Making Support Through System 1 and System 2 Thinking

Making high-stakes personal decisions involves cognitive, emotional, and intuitive processes, and individuals differ in how they allocate attention across these modes. Integration of these processes has shown to benefit decision making. Yet, most current decision-support systems focus primarily on supporting cognitive aspects, rather than adapting to the individual's thinking profile to support integration of different types of thoughts. In this study, we investigate an agent designed to encourage integration by adapting to the individual user's thought patterns. We explore its effects on participants' perceptions of the agent and their reflective behavior, in comparison with unaided pre-reflection and a baseline agent. In a between-subjects study (N = 128), our agent, which fostered broad and elaborated thinking, enabled more personalized reflective trajectories, elicited more integrative reflective language, and was perceived as providing stronger support for holistic reflection. In contrast, the baseline agent produced homogenized profiles dominated by cognitive language across participants.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Reflection Before Action: Designing a Framework for Quantifying Thought Patterns for Increased Self-awareness in Personal Decision Making

When making significant life decisions, people increasingly turn to conversational AI tools, such as large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs often steer users toward solutions, limiting metacognitive awareness of their own decision-making. In this paper, we shift the focus in decision support from solution-orientation to reflective activity, coining the term pre-decision reflection (PDR). We introduce PROBE, the first framework that assesses pre-decision reflections along two dimensions: breadth (diversity of thought categories) and depth (elaborateness of reasoning). Coder agreement demonstrates PROBE's reliability in capturing how people engage in pre-decision reflection. Our study reveals substantial heterogeneity across participants and shows that people perceived their unassisted reflections as deeper and broader than PROBE's measures. By surfacing hidden thought patterns, PROBE opens opportunities for technologies that foster self-awareness and strengthen people's agency in choosing which thought patterns to rely on in decision-making.

cs.HC↗