Type of Automation Failure: The Effects on Trust and Reliance in Automation

Abstract

Past automation research has focused primarily on machine-related factors (e.g., automation reliability) and human-related factors (e.g., accountability). Other machine-related factors such as type of automation errors, misses or false alarms, have been noticeably overlooked. These two automation errors correspond to potential operator errors, omission (misses) and commission (false alarms), which have proven to directly affect operators' trust in automation. This proposed research will examine how automation-error-type affects operator trust and begin to develop baseline trust measures as they relate to error type and participant age. It is expected that participants presented with more automation false alarms than misses will experience a larger degradation of subjective trust than those presented with equal numbers of false alarms and misses or more automation misses than false alarms.