This research was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (DP160101891). We thank Daniel White for programming the maritime surveillance task and for providing excellent technical support.
Humans increasingly use automated decision aids. However, environmental uncertainty means that automated advice can be incorrect, creating the potential for humans to act on incorrect advice or to disregard correct advice. We present a quantitative model of the cognitive process by which humans use automation when deciding whether aircraft would violate requirements for minimum separation. The model closely fitted the performance of 24 participants, who each made 2,400 conflict-detection decisions (conflict vs. nonconflict), either manually (with no assistance) or with the assistance of 90% reliable automation. When the decision aid was correct, conflict-detection accuracy improved, but when the decision aid was incorrect, accuracy and response time were impaired. The model indicated that participants integrated advice into their decision process by inhibiting evidence accumulation toward the task response that was incongruent with that advice, thereby ensuring that decisions could not be made solely on automated advice without first sampling information from the task environment.
Air traffic controllers can sometimes forget to complete deferred tasks, with safety implications. In two experiments, we examined how the presence and type of interruptions influenced the probability and speed at which individuals remembered to perform deferred tasks in simulated air traffic control (ATC). Participants were required to accept/handoff aircraft, detect aircraft conflicts, and perform two deferred tasks: a deferred conflict task that required remembering to resolve a conflict in the future and a deferred handoff task that required substituting an alternative aircraft handoff action in place of routine handoff action. Relative to no interruption, a blank display interruption slowed deferred conflict resumption, but this effect was not augmented by a cognitively demanding n-back task or a secondary ATC task interruption. However, the ATC task interruption increased the probability of failing to resume the deferred conflict relative to the blank interruption. An ex-Gaussian model of resumption times revealed that these resumption failures likely reflected true forgetting of the deferred task. Deferred handoff task performance was unaffected by interruptions. These findings suggest that remembering to resume a deferred task in simulated ATC depended on frequent interaction with situational cues on the display and that individuals were particularly susceptible to interference-based forgetting. (PsycINFO Database Record
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