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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>How Do Different Levels of User Control Affect Cognitive Load and Acceptance of Recommendations?</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Yucheng Jin</string-name>
          <email>yucheng.jin@cs.kuleuven.be</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Bruno Cardoso</string-name>
          <email>bruno.cardoso@cs.kuleuven.be</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Katrien Verbert</string-name>
          <email>katrien.verbert@cs.kuleuven.be</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Department of Computer</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Science</addr-line>
          ,
          <institution>KU Leuven</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Leuven</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="BE">Belgium</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>User control has been recognised as an important feature in recommender system, as it allows users to steer the recommendation process. Most typical user controls relate to providing ratings, editing user data, and adjusting weights of the algorithm. The cognitive load of the user may increase when using more advanced user controls. We divided common user controls into three levels (high, middle, and low) and conducted a study (N=90) to investigate how different levels of user control affect cognitive load and quality of recommendations. We designed a visualisation on top of a music recommender system that incorporates three levels of control. The study results show that high level control tends to produce the best recommendations, while requiring the highest cognitive load. However, only participants with rich experience in recommender systems are more likely to tweak such high level control, while the majority of participants still prefers low and middle level control. We validated the robustness of our findings with three different algorithms.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        INTRODUCTION
Recommender systems are ubiquitous today and we can find
them in many application domains. These recommendation
algorithms and powerful big data technologies allow
applications to provide high quality recommendations to users,
increasing their acceptance potential and, in turn, leading to
improved user satisfaction and perceived effectiveness.
Extensive research has been conducted in the past decades to
Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for
Recommender Systems, Como, Italy.
©2017. Copyright for the individual papers remains with the authors.
Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is
published and copyrighted by its editors.
develop and enhance algorithmic techniques such as
contentbased filtering, collaborative filtering, knowledge-based
filtering and hybridisations. However, many researchers have
argued that other factors beyond accuracy may influence the
user experience with recommender-based platforms [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref22">22, 17</xref>
        ].
Recently, user-centred research has gained a lot of attention in
the field of recommender systems and various metrics [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref21">21, 16</xref>
        ]
of user experience assessment have been proposed, including
diversity, serendipity, trust, transparency, and controllability.
Enhancing the user experience from these perspectives
requires effective user interaction with the system. Much of the
existing literature proposes to address the well-known
“blackbox” issue by focusing on providing visualisations that expose
the recommender algorithm to the user. Such visualisations
empower the user to inspect the recommender process and
further tune the system to receive better recommendations.
The metric of controllability is of particular relevance to this
work and indicates how much the system supports the user to
configure the recommender process to improve the
recommendations. It has been regarded as an important index to evaluate
the overall user experience of recommender systems, as lower
levels of user control negatively influence the perceived quality
of recommendations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. For example, a system that keeps
recommending hotels to a user who has booked a hotel recently
may annoy the user if the system does not provide a
mechanism to reject recommendations or adjust her preferences. In
order to address this problem, a variety of recommender
systems have components to rate recommendations, modify user
data, and adjust various settings of the recommender engine
itself, such as parameter weight [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]. However, user interfaces
may become difficult to understand when containing many
control components [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. Therefore, we assume that levels of
user control may influence the cognitive load of the user when
using the system.
      </p>
      <p>To investigate this hypothesis, we used the Spotify API 1
to design a music recommender system and to explore how
different levels of user control influence the cognitive load of
system use. We visualise recommendations by a column based
diagram and use colour to link related items in each column. It
is suitable for representing the relationship between user data
and recommendations. The recommender system integrates
three recommender algorithms. The first one is based on the</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>1https://developer.spotify.com/web-api</title>
      <p>top seeds (top artists, top tracks and top genres) generated by
the user. The second one is an item-item collaborative filtering
algorithm that lists the top tracks of artists who are related
to followed artists. The third one is a hybrid algorithm that
combines these two algorithms.</p>
      <p>Usually, measuring the cognitive load relies on self-reported
data or analysis of physiological data. The approach of
selfreporting uses questionnaires such as NASA-TLX 2 to ask
users about their experience after performing tasks. In turn,
the physiological data approach usually analyses EEG and
eyetracking data to predict cognitive load during the tasks. Both
approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Although
using physiological data can provide real-time information, it
is difficult to set up for online studies. Therefore, we use a
classic cognitive load testing questionnaire, the NASA-TLX, to
assess cognitive load on six aspects: mental demand, physical
demand, temporal demand, performance, effort, and
frustration. In addition, we also investigate the effects of different
levels of user control on acceptance of recommendations by
asking users to rate recommended songs.</p>
      <p>
        The interactive recommendation framework proposed by He
et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ] defines three main components in interactive
recommenders: user data and context, medium, and
recommendations. We therefore define different levels of user control
for each component in Table 1.
      </p>
      <p>
        Our study aims to provide the groundwork for developing
highquality recommender systems offering sufficient user control,
while demanding acceptable cognitive load. Specifically, we
investigate the following questions:
RQ1: Do different levels of user control have an impact on
the cognitive load of using recommender systems and, if so,
what is the impact?
RQ2: Do different levels of user control have an effect on
acceptance of recommendations?
RQ3: Will different recommender algorithms influence the
answers to RQ1 and RQ2?
Andjelkovic et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] already show that users spend more
effort with systems offering higher levels of user control than
with systems with lower levels of user control. However,
to the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive work has
yet investigated to what extent varying levels of user control
influence the cognitive load of using recommender systems
2https://humansystems.arc.nasa.gov/groups/tlx
and the perceived quality of their recommendations. With
regards to related work, our contributions are the following:
1. We define three levels of user control (low, middle, high)
based on estimated work load of tweaking each level of
control.
2. By leveraging the metaphors of “processing” and
“production”, we design and develop an interactive music
recommender with a drag and drop user interface to help the user
understand the recommendation process.
3. We conduct a user study to investigate the user cognitive
load and the perceived quality of recommendation under
the three defined levels of user control. We also validate our
findings with three recommender algorithms.
4. Based on our findings, we discuss the possible ways to
balance levels of user control and required cognitive load in the
recommendation process. In addition, we also demonstrate
what kind of users are more likely to benefit from each level
of user control.
      </p>
      <p>This paper is organised as follows: we first introduce related
work covering interactive recommenders that support user
control, and research on cognitive load of recommender
visualisations. We then describe the system design of our recommender
system. The next section introduces the design of study,
followed by results of the user study. Finally, we conclude with a
discussion of study findings and limitations.</p>
      <p>
        RELATED WORK
User Control in Recommender Systems
Many HCI researchers [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18 ref25">25, 18</xref>
        ] count controllability as one of
most prominent factors that influence overall user experience
with recommender systems. Current user control research
focuses on rating recommendations, revising the user profile,
and adjusting recommendation parameters such as weight [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ].
User control has been an integral part of research on interactive
recommender systems. Previous work shows a positive effect
of user control on user satisfaction [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref20">20, 10</xref>
        ] and perceived
quality [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ] of recommendations. We review several typical
systems that increase user involvement in various stages of
the recommendation process, through different levels of user
control.
      </p>
      <p>
        TasteWeights [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ], LinkedVis [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ] and SetFusion [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ] use
sliders to revise user profile data and adjust the weights of the
recommender engine components, thereby improving
recommendation accuracy and user experience. As a result, users
gain insight into how their actions affect the recommendations
in real-time. Some systems [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14 ref19 ref4">19, 4, 14</xref>
        ] use the distance
between data nodes and the active user to represent the weight
of the selected node, which allows users to modify
recommendation preferences by adjusting the distances. PARIS-Ad [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]
researches the effects of user control on targeted advertising.
It allows the user to adjust her profile with drop-down lists
and check-lists, and visualises the recommendation process
in a flowchart. MusiCube [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ] refines the recommendations
by asking the user to rate as many of the resulting items as
possible. All these systems demonstrate that user control has
a prominent impact on the accuracy and effectiveness of
recommendations. However, it is not clear if varying levels of
user control affect the robustness of the findings. We
therefore intend to compare recommendation ratings in different
experimental tasks entailing different levels of user control.
Cognitive Load
The construct of “cognitive load” is usually used to measure
how many cognitive resources are taken up by activities that
facilitate learning [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ]. In general, cognitive load measurement
is performed through the application of a post-study in the
form of a self-assessment questionnaire, or the analysis of
physiological data collected during task execution. The NASA
task-load index (NASA-TLX) is one of the most widely used
questionnaires to measure cognitive load, along six
dimensions: mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand,
own perception of performance, effort and frustration.
Although it is not designed to measure cognitive load in real-time,
it is easy to apply and reliable in many conditions.
The information visualisation community has adopted
various physiological data to measure the cognitive load of using
different visualisation techniques [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
        ]. Typically, researchers
analyse eye tracking [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] and brain activity [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] data to estimate
the cognitive load while performing tasks. However, even
though physiological methods provide the means to estimate
cognitive load in real-time, the cost of hardware such as eye
trackers and electroencephalography (EEG) systems and
professional training for analysing produced data are substantial
barriers to the widespread adoption of this approach.
Previous work has demonstrated various ways of decreasing
cognitive load while improving the performance of interactive
recommender systems. Schnabel et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ] use shortlists as
digital short-term memory. Since users do not need to keep the
considered items in their minds, the cognitive load is reduced.
Quiroga et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ] pointed out that information filtering and
building profiles on users’ organisational behaviour is essential
to reduce cognitive load.
      </p>
      <p>
        Although we do not find that related work reveals the relation
between levels of user control and cognitive load, Andjelkovic
et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] observed in their music recommender that additional
control to new aspects such as avatars might increase
cognitive load. In addition, Adil Yalçinn et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ] presented the
Cognitive Exploration Framework, providing guidelines to
reduce the cognitive load in their defined six stages of cognitive
activities in visual data exploration.
      </p>
      <p>In our study, we not only aim to provide effective user control
to enhance the user experience with recommender systems, but
also to investigate how different levels of user control affect
the cognitive load and recommendation quality. Moreover, we
provide groundwork for designing user-centred recommender
systems that also adapt to different levels of user cognitive
load.</p>
      <p>SYSTEM DESIGN AND INTERACTIONS
Recommendation Algorithms
In order to validate our research findings with different
recommender approaches, we implemented three different
algorithms to generate music recommendations by using the
Spotify API.</p>
      <p>Seed based algorithm
The Spotify API provides a recommender service that
generates a play-list-style listening experience based on three types
of seeds: artists, tracks and genres. We use the active user’s
top artists, tracks and genres as input seeds. It is worth noting
that the top artists and tracks are calculated by affinity, which
is a measure of expected user preference for a particular track
or artist based on her listening history. The number of songs
recommended through the use of a particular seed depends on
the weight of the seed’s type and the priority of the used seed
among the seeds of same type.</p>
      <p>Artist based algorithm
The artist-based algorithm uses the item-item collaborative
filtering approach. First, the algorithm reads the list of
userfollowed artists. Then, the Spotify API allows us to find
artists related to a followed artist by calculating the similarity
between them, which is based on analyses of the Spotify
community listening history. The top 20 tracks of these related
artists are returned. The number of recommendations by an
artist is proportional to the weight of the artist.</p>
      <p>Hybrid based algorithm
The hybrid based algorithm combines the seed based algorithm
and artist based algorithm. The same weight is assigned to
both algorithms.</p>
      <p>User Interface and Visualisations
The user interface of the recommender was designed using
the metaphor of “processing” and “production”. It consists of
three parts:
(a) The recommendations source view works as a warehouse of
source data, such as top artists, top tracks, top genres, and
followed artists, generated from past listening history.
(b) The recommendations processor shows areas in which
source items can be dropped from part (a). The dropped
data are bound to UI controls such as sliders or sortable lists
for weight adjustment. It also contains an additional info
view to inspect details of selected data items. In addition,
a pair of radio buttons allows the user to switch between
different algorithms.
(c) recommendations: the recommended results are shown in a
play-list style.</p>
      <p>Visualisation of the seed based algorithm
As presented in Figure 1(a), we use three distinct colors to
represent types of recommendation source data as visual cues
(yellow for artists, green for tracks, and blue for genres).
Additional source data for a particular type is loaded by clicking
the “+” icon next to the title of source data type. Likewise,
we use the same color schema to encode the data type slider
and selected source data (Figure 1 (b)), and recommendations
(Figure 1 (c)). As a result, the visual cues show the relation
among the data in three steps of the recommendation process.
When users click on a particular data item in the
recommendation processor, the corresponding recommended items will be
highlighted, and an additional info view displays its details.
Visualisation of the artist based algorithm
To emphasise the concept of artist relations, this algorithm only
contains artist data items represented by the corresponding
artists’ portraits in addition to their names (Figure 2 (a)). When
users drag an artist and drop it in the selected artists block,
the top five related artists of the dropped artist are shown,
each with a slider to adjust its weight (Figure 2 (b)). Similar
to the first visualization, recommendations are highlighted
when users click on a particular artist in the recommendation
processor (Figure 2 (c)) to depict their relation.</p>
      <p>Interactions and User Controls
Our system offers several interactions to support our three
levels of user control.</p>
      <p>Low level of user control
In this level, users can sort the recommendation results by
preference through a drop-down menu. Although ratings
normally have no immediate effects on recommendations, we
still regard recommendations feedback as a kind of low level
user control. The star rating widget beside song title allows
users to rate the songs in the recommendation list (Figure 1(c),
Figure 2(c)).</p>
      <p>Middle level of user control
In general, manipulating source data and checking details
compose the middle level of user control. A drag and drop
interface allows users to intuitively add a new source data item
to update recommendations (Figure 1(a), Figure 2(a)). When
a preferred source item is dropped to the recommendation
processor, a progress animation will play until the end of the
processing. Users are also able to simply remove a dropped
data item from the processor by clicking the corresponding
“x” icon. Moreover, by selecting an individual item, users can
inspect its detail: artists are accompanied by their name, an
image, popularity, genres, and number of followers; tracks are
shown with their name, album cover, popularity, and audio
clip; and genres are accompanied by their top related artists
and tracks.</p>
      <p>High level of user control
The high level of user control allows users to tweak the
underlying algorithm as a basis to further manipulate the
recommendation process. To support this level of control, multiple
UI components are developed to adjust the weight associated
with the type of data items, or the weight associated to an
individual data item. In the seed based algorithm, users are
able to specify their preferences for each data type by
manipulating a slider for each data type. By sorting a list of dropped
data items, users can set the weight of each item in this list
(Figure 1(b)). Similarly, the weight of related artists can be
manipulated by moving its associated slider in the artist based
algorithm visualisation (Figure 2(b)).</p>
      <p>EVALUATION
We evaluated our system by conducting a study on Amazon
Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with 107 participants who are all
active users of Spotify. 17 of our participants were rejected
because of their repetitive and invalid answers. In the end,
we had 90 valid participants (48 female, 42 male), their ages
ranged from 20 to 48 years (mean age = 29.8 years, SD =
7.51, Median = 28). 86.67% of participants are familiar with
recommender system. We paid $ 1 for each study. The average
study completion time was around 33 minutes (SD = 7.23,
Median = 33).</p>
      <p>Evaluation Design
We designed a within-subjects study to investigate the effects
of different levels of user control on cognitive load and
acceptance of recommendations. Therefore, we created three
experimental tasks T1, T2, and T3 corresponding to the
different levels of user control.</p>
      <p>T1 Users were only allowed to interact with recommendations
by sorting recommendations (low level control) in a list. In the
end, they rated each song in the list of recommended items.
T2: Users were asked to interact with recommendations by
sorting (low level control) recommendations and modifying
recommendation source (moderate level control). Finally, they
rated each song.</p>
      <p>T3: Users were asked to interact with recommendations by
sorting (low level control) recommendations, modifying
recommendation source (moderate level control), tweaking the
parameters of algorithms (high level control). Once again,
participants were asked to rate each song.</p>
      <p>We split the 90 participants equally into three groups to
validate the results with three different settings of recommender
algorithms: the seed-based algorithm (Setting 1), the
artistbased algorithm (Setting 2), and a hybrid of the two algorithms
with equal weight (Setting 3).</p>
      <p>Participants of each group tested one algorithm setting with
three experimental tasks. The order of the three tasks has been
mixed to avoid learning effects.</p>
      <p>
        Evaluation Procedure
The participants were asked to watch a task tutorial. Only the
features of the particular setting were shown in this video.
After interacting with the visualization, participants were asked
to rate the top-20 recommended songs that resulted from their
interaction, and to fill out the NASA-TLX questionnaire to
measure their cognitive load. Users had to complete this
questionnaire in the three experimental tasks. At the end of the
task, they were asked to fill out a questionnaire that was based
on a part of the ResQue to evaluate the perceived quality of
the recommender with all levels of user control. To assess the
validity of the responses, we set contradictory questions in this
questionnaire. In addition, user interactions with the different
components of the visualization were recorded in a log.
RESULTS
To analyze the cognitive load, we calculated the score from
participant responses to the NASA-TLX questionnaire, which
ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the score is, the more
cognitive load is required. Since we intend to measure the overall
accuracy of a recommendation list, we apply the Breese’s
R-Score “utility” metric [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ] to calculate a utility score. The
rating score for a song ranges from 1 to 5, and the default score
is 1. We also analyze responses to the ResQue-based
questionnaire, and report the results separately for each recommender
algorithm.
      </p>
      <p>Cognitive load
Setting 1: seed based
Descriptive statistics show that participants have the highest
cognitive load in T3 (M=57.14), followed by T2 (M=46.11)
and T1 (M=31.43). We performed a one-way repeated
ANOVA to test for significance. There was a significant effect
for cognitive load, F(2, 58) = 44.47, p&lt;.001.
Bonferronicorrected pairwise comparisons (sig. level = .016) revealed
that T3 requires significantly higher cognitive load than T2
(p&lt;.001) and T1 (p&lt;.001). T2 required a significantly higher
cognitive load than T1 (p&lt;.001).</p>
      <p>Setting 2: artist based
Descriptive statistics show that participants in T3 (M=50.32)
have the highest cognitive load, followed by T2 (M=38.57) and
T1 (M=30.24). To test for significance, we performed a
oneway repeated ANOVA test. To compensate for violations of the
sphericity assumption (Mauchly’s (W(df=2) = .721, (p=.010),
the significance levels were corrected by Greenhouse-Geisser.
The corrected score shows a significant effect for cognitive
load, F(1.56, 45.36) = 15.42, p&lt;.001. Bonferroni-corrected
pairwise comparisons (sig. level = .016) revealed that T3
required significantly higher cognitive load than T2 (p=.001)
and T1 (p&lt;.001), and T2 required significantly higher load
than T1 (p=.009).</p>
      <p>Setting 3: hybrid
Descriptive statistics show that T3 (M=52.14) requires the
highest cognitive load, followed by T2 (M=45.87) and T1
(M=34.44). To test for significance, we performed a one-way
repeated ANOVA test. The corrected score shows a significant
effect for cognitive load, F(2, 58) = 8.54, p=.001.
Bonferronicorrected pairwise comparisons (sig. level = .016) revealed
that both T3 (p&lt;.001) and T2 (p=.001) require significantly
higher cognitive load than T1.</p>
      <p>In general, T3 requires a significantly higher cognitive load in
all three settings. But the differences between T2 and T1 and
between T3 and T2 are not always significant.</p>
      <p>Acceptance of recommendations
Setting 1: seed based
Descriptive statistics show that the list of recommendations
in T3 (M=3.49) was rated higher than T2 (M=2.95) and T1
(M=2.08). A one-way repeated ANOVA test was conducted
for examining significance. A significant effect is found for
user rating, F(2, 58) = 25.04, p&lt;.001. Bonferroni-corrected
pairwise comparisons (sig. level = .016) revealed that ratings
of recommendations in T3 was rated significantly higher than
those in T2 (p=.003) and T1 (p=.001), and recommendations
in T2 were rated significantly higher than those in T1 (p=.001).
Setting 2: artist based
Descriptive statistics show that the list of recommendations
in T3 (M=3.54) was rated higher than in T2 (M=2.92) and
T1 (M=2.41). The result of a one-way repeated ANOVA test
shows a significant effect for user rating, F(2, 58) = 14.68,
p&lt;.001. Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons (sig. level
= .016) revealed that recommendations in T3 were rated
significantly higher than in T2 (p&lt;.001) and T1 (p=.001).
Setting 3: hybrid
Descriptive statistics show that the list of recommendations
in T3 (M=3.27) was rated higher than in T2 (M=3.21) and
T1 (M=2.59). The result of a one-way repeated ANOVA
test shows a significant effect for user rating, F(2, 58) =
7.80, p&lt;.001. Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons (sig.
level = .016) revealed that the lists of recommendations in T3
(p=.002) and T2 (p=.004) were rated significantly higher than
in T1.</p>
      <p>By comparing the findings of different settings, we find that the
list of recommendations in T3 was always rated significantly
higher than in other settings.</p>
      <p>Settings</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Setting 1 Setting 2 Setting 3</title>
      <p>Low level
60.5%
54.4%,
51.9%,</p>
      <p>Middle level</p>
      <p>High level
Overall user experience
The left bar chart (Figure 3) plots users’ attitudes towards the
various controls of the recommender systems. Participants
seem to enjoy using a drag-and-drop interface to manipulate
the recommendation process. The system also allows users to
express their preferences easily. In general, users like to give
feedback and modify their data. However, it seems that only a
part of participants would like to control more components of
the system. It is worth noting that 91.1% of the participants
who would like to tweak the high level control have experience
with recommender systems and 95.6% of them enjoy listening
to music online.</p>
      <p>The chart on the right side illustrates the users’ positive
responses to our system in terms of other user experience aspects
such as novelty, diversity and confidence. Users indicated that
using our system was fun and that they easily became familiar
with the system. Despite these merits, some users are not sure
they would use this system frequently to listen to music.
Log file data
Since we intend to know how often users will interact with
each user control, we also analyzed interaction data.
We report the percentage of interactions for each level of
control in T3, where all levels of control are presented (Table 2).
More than half of the interactions are related to low level
controls, and around a quarter of clicks are related to middle level.
Only a small part of clicks were done with high level controls.
DISCUSSION
In this section, we discuss the results presented in the
previous section, thereby answering the research questions and
evaluating the proposed hypothesis.</p>
      <p>
        Overall, the results of NASA-TLX show that the higher level
of user control tends to increase cognitive load (RQ1).
Specially, we see that the high level user control has significantly
higher cognitive load than the low level, in all of the three
settings. Previous work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref12 ref20">12, 10, 20</xref>
        ] has reported that user control
improves the accuracy of recommendations. Furthermore, the
results of user ratings indicate that the level of control has a
significant influence on the acceptance of recommendations
(RQ2). The poor result in T1 may suffer from the unmodifiable
tags for bootstrapping the system. Also in our data, we can
observe that the high level user control increases the quality of
recommendations in all three settings. The effects of levels of
control on cognitive load and acceptance of recommendations
are not statistically significant when we compare the high level
control to the middle level, and the middle level control to
the low level in some settings. By comparing the mean value
of each result, our findings can be validated with different
algorithms (RQ3). Besides, it seems that participants have
difficult in understanding what they can control and have less
interest while performing T3 in Setting 2. A possible
explanation is that the current visualization does not clearly plot the
relations among artists, suggesting that a network graph could
be a better option.
      </p>
      <p>
        Log file data also suggests that users are more likely to tweak
the low level and the middle level control. By looking at the
user profile, we find that participants with rich experience
with recommender systems and online music tend to tweak
the high level user control more frequently. The majority of
participants prefers to have only low and middle level user
control. This may depend on user personal characteristics
and domain knowledge [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]. In addition, a drag-and-drop UI
seems to allow users to interact with the system intuitively.
In spite of the merits in our system, users hesitate to use it
for listening to music. A potential reason is that many users
prefer to listen and discover music on mobile devices with
simple interactions rather than on large screens with complex
interaction [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>CONCLUSION
We define three levels of user control to investigate the
effects of levels of control on cognitive load and acceptance of
recommendations. We designed and implemented a music
recommender with three distinct settings of recommender
algorithms. An online study was performed to answer research
questions. We conclude with the following findings:
By incorporating higher level of user control, cognitive load
tends to increase.</p>
      <p>By incorporating higher level of user control, the
recommendations are more likely to be accepted.</p>
      <p>Our research findings are generalizable to different
recommender algorithms.</p>
      <p>Our study has three main limitations: first, although we have
excluded unqualified users by setting contradictory questions
in questionnaires, the validity of study results may still
suffer from inattentive or “spamming” users. Second, the
research finding should be validated in other application
domains. Third, the research findings were found based on
specific user control mechanisms implemented in the study
system. Our future work will focus on adapting the user
interface of recommender systems to address the individual needs
and preferences of users.</p>
      <p>Acknowledgements
The research has been partially financed by the KU Leuven
Research Council (grant agreement no. C24/16/017).</p>
    </sec>
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