Overcoming underload and overload: The effect of stage and level of autonomy in routine-failure trade-off in human-autonomy teams

Abstract

We examined how human mental workload and the corresponding eye movement behaviors are affected by the stages and levels of autonomy in routine and autonomy failure conditions in human-autonomy teams (HAT). Thirty participants performed monitoring and diagnosing tasks with the autonomous agent in a three-factor experiment. The factors included information processing stage, level of autonomy, and agent operation condition. The results indicated that the later the agent-supported information processing stage or the higher the autonomy level, the higher the participants’ mental workload following autonomous agent failure. Compared to the continuous manual operation condition, the HAT performance did not decline following autonomous agent failure at the cost of increased mental workload. The eye movement results indicated a top-down compensatory control mechanism of attention, indicating the risk of team performance decline following autonomous agent failure. These findings can be applied in designing autonomous agents and setting human mental workload levels in a HAT.