Stages of Decision Automation: Impact on Operators’ Role, Awareness and Monitoring

Abstract

The study investigated the impact of different stages of decision automation (action selection vs. action implementation) on participants’ monitoring, situation awareness (SA), and role definition in a multitask simulation. It was hypothesized that particularly because of being out-of-the-loop when working with full automation (action implementation) operators might feel accountable for the overall task, have an enhanced SA and show frequent information sampling. In contrast, operators working with partial automation might define their role limited to the only task not supported by automation, leading to limited SA and overall monitoring. Results reveal an automation benefit for performance but a decreased SA induced by automation. No impact of automation was found for monitoring. The only direct impact of stage of automation was on participants’ perceived role regarding active interventions into the system. In summary, different stages of decision automation lead to different role perceptions but with marginal effects on performance and monitoring.