Publication Date
2022
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Assaf Harel, Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Ion Juvina, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gregory Funke, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Abstract
This study examines the effects of automation on the human user of that automation. Automation has been shown to produce a variety of benefits to employees in terms of performance and a reduction of workload, but research in this area indicates that this might be at the cost of situational awareness. This loss of situational awareness is thought to lead to “out-of-the-loop” performance effects. One way this set of effects has been explained is through the “lumberjack” analogy, which suggests these effects are related to degree of automation and automation failure. This study recreates the effects of automation on mental workload, performance, and situational awareness by altering the characteristics of automation in a UAV supervisory control environment; RESCHU was chosen because of its complexity and the ability to manipulate levels of control within the task. Afterwards, it will be discussed whether the effects align with the predictions of the lumberjack analogy. Participants were assigned to one of two automation reliability groups, routine or failure, and all participants experienced all three degrees of automation – manual/low, medium, and high. Scores collected for mental workload, situational awareness, and performance were compared across groups and conditions. Results indicated differences in performance for both degree of automation and reliability, but no interaction. There was also a main effect of degree of automation on raw NASA-TLX scores, with a few main effects reported for individual subscales.
Page Count
61
Department or Program
Department of Psychology
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Copyright
Copyright 2022, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
