Human operators supervising multiple uninhabited air and ground vehicles (UAVs and UGVs) under high task load must be supported appropriately in context by automation. Two experiments examined the efficacy of such adaptive automation in a simulated high workload reconnaissance mission involving four subtasks: (a) UAV target identification; (b) UGV route planning; (c) communications, with embedded verbal situation awareness probes; and (d) change detection. The results of the first "baseline" experiment established the sensitivity of a change detection procedure to transient and nontransient events in a complex, multi-window, dynamic display. Experiment 1 also set appropriate levels of low and high task load for use in Experiment 2, in which three automation conditions were compared: manual; static automation, in which an automated target recognition (ATR) system was provided for the UAV task; and adaptive automation, in which individual operator change detection performance was assessed in real time and used to invoke the ATR if and only if change detection accuracy was below a threshold. Change detection accuracy and situation awareness were higher and workload was lower for both automation conditions compared to manual performance. In addition, these beneficial effects on change detection and workload were significantly greater for adaptive compared to static automation. The results point to the efficacy of adaptive automation for supporting the human operator tasked with supervision of multiple uninhabited vehicles under high workload conditions.
The Masculine Gender Role Stress (MGRS) Scale identifies men who appraise challenges to their masculine gender ideology as stressful. This experiment investigated the effects of masculine gender relevance of task instructions on cardiovascular reactivity and serial subtraction performance of men who scored high or low on the MGRS. High MGRS men showed significantly greater increases in systolic blood pressure following masculine gender-relevant than masculine gender-irrelevant instructions; low MGRS men did not. Following masculine gender-relevant instructions, high MGRS men made significantly fewer correct responses in serial subtraction than did low MGRS men; gender-irrelevant instructions produced no significant group differences. Results suggested that some men's susceptibility to appraise challenges to their masculine ideology as stressful augments their arousal levels and impairs their cognitive performance.
We simulated a generic military crew station and examined the workload and performance of robotics operators when interacting with a ground robot in the two modes of robotic autonomy, teleoperation or semi-autonomous. We examined the effect of autonomy and invocation strategies on performance. The operator had either full teleoperation (manual) or semiautonomy (static) regardless of task load. In a third condition, the robots autonomy changed based on task load (adaptive). The operator had to identify hostile targets during the mission and maintain situation awareness (SA) of his local environment and the overall mission via a SA map. Results showed that when task load increased from low to high, participants' SA performance was better in the adaptive and static automation conditions than the manual condition; their threat detection performance degradation was less in manual and adaptive than in the static condition. On the other hand, when task load shifted from high to low, threat detection performance was better in the adaptive than the other two conditions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.