Influence of levels of automation on the sense of agency during continuous action

Sayako Ueda,Ryoichi Nakashima,Takatsune Kumada

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-82036-3

Abstract

Recent advances in automation technology can lead to unsafe situations where operators lose their sense of agency over the automated equipment. On the other hand, increasing evidence has shown that providing operators with opportunities of continuous operation and helping them improve their performance on tasks through automation can boost their sense of agency. However, it is challenging to ensure that the operator maintains a sense of agency when working with a fully automated tool that removes him/her from the control loop. By demonstrating a tracking task in which participants continuously tracked a moving target through a cursor controlled by a joystick under different levels of automation, we illustrate how the participants’ sense of agency and tracking performance were altered in accordance with the level of automation. The results showed that their sense of agency was enhanced by increasing automation but began to decline when the level of automation exceeded 90%. More generally, this suggests that allowing operators a little contribution to control over the continuous operation of an automated tool may be sufficient to maintain their sense of agency while yielding the maximum improvement in performance.

Highlights

Of agency over the automated equipment is important for designing successful applications that can keep operators in the control loop
The combination of two measures can be taken to maintain the operators’ sense of agency over the automated equipment: To provide operators with opportunities for continuous operation of the equipment even if this is not entirely reflected in the output, and to help them improve their performance on tasks through automation
It was considered unlikely that the participants would have maintained their sense of agency in the full automation condition, even if they continuously operated the joystick, because they would have had nothing to do with the apparent cursor movement

Summary

Introduction

Of agency over the automated equipment is important for designing successful applications that can keep operators in the control loop. Nataraj et al.[13], by using a virtual reality environment in which the participants controlled a virtual hand to perform reach-to-grasp movements, showed that the sense of agency decreased if modifications in the movement of the virtual hand due to the automation degraded task performance These results suggest a positive relationship between apparent task performance as modified by automation and the sense of agency in situations where people continuously operate a tool featuring some automation. We investigated the relationship between apparent task performance and the operator’s sense of agency over a tool, in a situation in which he/she continuously operates the tool with various levels of automation To this end, we used a tracking task where the participants were asked to continuously track a moving target on a computer screen with a cursor controlled by a joystick at different levels of automation, varying from complete control by the participant to full automation. In Experiment 2, we identified the turning point where the participants’ sense of agency decreases to lower than that in the complete control condition

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Discussion

Conclusion