ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Assessing healthy distrust in human-AI interaction: Interpreting changes in visual attention
Provisionally accepted
- University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
When humans interact with artificial intelligence (AI), one desideratum is appropriate trust. Typically, appropriate trust encompasses that humans trust AI except for instances in which they either explicitly notice AI errors or are suspicious that errors could be present. So far, appropriate trust or related notions have mainly been investigated by assessing trust and reliance. In this contribution, we argue that these assessments are insufficient to measure the complex aim of appropriate trust and the related notion of healthy distrust. We introduce and test the perspective of covert visual attention as an additional indicator for appropriate trust and draw conceptual connections to the notion of healthy distrust. To test the validity of our conceptualization, we formalize visual attention using the Theory of Visual Attention and measure its properties that are potentially relevant to appropriate trust and healthy distrust in an image classification task. Based on temporal-order judgment performance, we estimate participants’ attentional capacity and attentional weight towards correct and incorrect mock-up AI classifications. We observe that misclassifications reduce attentional capacity compared to correct classifications. However, our results do not indicate that this reduction is beneficial for a subsequent judgment of the classifications. The attentional weighting is not affected by the classifications’ correctness but by the difficulty of categorizing the stimuli themselves. We discuss these results, their implications, and the limited potential for using visual attention as an indicator of appropriate trust and healthy distrust.
Keywords: Appropriate trust, healthy distrust, visual attention, Theory of visual attention, Human-AI interaction, Bayesian cognitivemodel, image classification
Received: 28 Aug 2025; Accepted: 10 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Peters, Biermeier and Scharlau. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tobias Martin Peters, tobias.peters@uni-paderborn.de
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.