Level of Automation Effects on Situation Awareness and Functional Specificity in Automation Reliance

Abstract

This work investigated the relationship between task performance and situation awareness ( SA) at different levels of automation (LOA). The conventional wisdom is that routine performance improves with level of automation but that the consequences of automation failure become more severe. This has been characterized as a routine-failure trade-off, However, recent research indicates that the trade-off is subject to unknown contextual factors in addition to the level of automation. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the human operator’s SA may impact whether the trade-off between performance under routine and failure conditions is always tenable. The current study therefore aimed to i) provide evidence to support or refute the trade-off and ii) to identify possible extenuating factors. The results generally supported the existence of the routine-failure trade-off, though the strength of this finding was tempered somewhat by operators’ apparent selective disuse of higher level automation which limited the effective range of LOA tested. We interpreted that the SA collection method made the goal of SA maintenance explicit and in doing so encouraged operators to preferentially reallocate attention away from other system goals. Thus, the functional structure of the task seems to affect whether the routine-failure trade-off occurs in a given instance.