TASK HANDOFF BETWEEN HUMANS AND AUTOMATION

Abstract

The Department of Defense (DOD) seeks to incorporate human-automation teaming to decrease human operators’ cognitive workload, especially in the context of future vertical lift (FVL). Researchers created a “wizard of oz” study to observe human behavior changes as task difficulty and levels of automation increased. The platform used for the study was a firefighting strategy software game called C3Fire. Participants were paired with a confederate acting as an automated agent to observe the participant’s behavior in a human-automation team. The independent variables were automation level (within; low, medium, high) and queuing (between; uncued, cued). The dependent variables were the number of messages transmitted to the confederate, the number of tasks embedded in those messages (tasks handed off), and the participant’s self-reported cognitive workload score. The study results indicated that as the confederate increased its scripted level of automation, the number of tasks handed off to automation increased. However, the number of messages transmitted to automation and the subjective cognitive workload remained the same. The study’s findings suggest that while human operators were able to bundle tasks, cognitive workload remained relatively unchanged. The results imply that the automation level may have less impact on cognitive workload than anticipated.