Conversational Decision Support for Information Search Under Uncertainty: Effects of Gist and Verbatim Feedback
Kexin Quan, Jessie Chin

TL;DR
This study introduces SERA, an AI assistant providing gist or verbatim feedback during information search, which improves decision accuracy and confidence, especially under high uncertainty, by guiding search strategies effectively.
Contribution
The paper presents SERA, a novel LLM-based decision support system that adapts feedback granularity to uncertainty, enhancing search efficiency and decision quality.
Findings
Gist feedback leads to more efficient information integration.
Verbatim feedback encourages more extensive exploration.
Support from SERA improves decision accuracy and confidence under uncertainty.
Abstract
Many real-world decisions rely on information search, where people sample evidence and decide when to stop under uncertainty. The uncertainty in the environment, particularly how diagnostic evidence is distributed, causes complexities in information search, further leading to suboptimal decision-making outcomes. Yet AI decision support often targets outcome optimization, and less is known about how to scaffold search without increasing cognitive load. We introduce SERA, an LLM-based assistant that provides either gist or verbatim feedback during search. Across two experiments (N1=54, N2=54), we examined decision-making outcomes and information search in SERA-Gist, SERA-Verbatim, and a no-feedback baseline across three environments varying in uncertainty. The uncertainty in environment is operationalized by the perceived gain of information across the course of sampling, which…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsNeural and Behavioral Psychology Studies · Human-Automation Interaction and Safety · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
