Displaced interactions in human-automation relationships: Transparency over time

Abstract

Transparency (roughly, the provision of information about what the automated system is doing and why, potentially at multiple levels of abstraction and goal directedness) in automated systems has repeatedly been shown to improve human-machine interaction and performance, as well as human acceptance and trust. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental problem with providing transparency information at the time of action execution: specifically, that excessive human workload, which typically motivates the inclusion of automated systems, may not permit the absorption of the transparent information. We propose “displacing” the provision of transparent information in time and/or space from the time of execution and show how this approach is tied to beneficial findings for pre-mission planning and post-mission debriefing and explanations in human-automation interaction.