Effects of Individual Differences on Operators' Interaction with Imperfect Automation in a Simulated Multitasking Environment.

摘要

We simulated a military tank environment and examined the performance of the combined position of gunner and robotics operator and how aided target recognition (AiTR) capabilities with imperfect reliability (i.e., miss-prone or false-alarm-prone) for the gunnery task might affect the concurrent robotics and communication tasks. Specifically, we investigated whether performance was affected by individual differences in attentional control and spatial ability. Results showed that when the robotics task was simply monitoring the video, participants had the best performance in their gunnery and communication tasks and the lowest perceived workload, compared with the other robotics tasking conditions. There was a strong interaction between the type of AiTR unreliability and participants' perceived attentional control. Overall, for participants with higher perceived attentional control, false-alarm-prone alerts were more detrimental; for low attentional control participants, conversely, miss-prone automation was more harmful. Consistent with previous findings, low spatial ability participants preferred visual cueing, and high spatial ability participants favored tactile cueing.