Delays in Human-Computer Interaction and Their Effects on Brain Activity

The temporal contingency of feedback is an essential requirement of successful human-computer interactions. The timing of feedback not only affects the behavior of a user but is also accompanied by changes in psychophysiology and neural activity. In three fMRI experiments we systematically studied the impact of delayed feedback on brain activity while subjects performed an auditory categorization task. In the first fMRI experiment, we analyzed the effects of rare and thus unexpected delays of different delay duration on brain activity. In the second experiment, we investigated if users can adapt to frequent delays. Therefore, delays were presented as often as immediate feedback. In a third experiment, the influence of interaction outage was analyzed by measuring the effect of infrequent omissions of feedback on brain activity. The results show that unexpected delays in feedback presentation compared to immediate feedback stronger activate inter alia bilateral the anterior insular cortex, the posterior medial frontal cortex, the left inferior parietal lobule and the right inferior frontal junction. The strength of this activation increases with the duration of the delay. Thus, delays interrupt the course of an interaction and trigger an orienting response that in turn activates brain regions of action control. If delays occur frequently, users can adapt, delays become expectable, and the brain activity in the observed network diminishes over the course of the interaction. However, introducing rare omissions of expected feedback reduces the system’s trustworthiness which leads to an increase in brain activity not only in response to such omissions but also following frequently occurring and thus expected delays.