The impact of context-related reliability on automation failure detection and scanning behaviour

This article presents an experiment that examined the effect of providing operators with information about the context-related nature of automation reliability. Results are compared against those from previous experiments where no information about automation reliability was provided to participants. Providing context led to a significant increase in participants' detection performance of automation failures in situations known to trigger poor detection performance (i.e., under constant and highly reliable automation). This improvement in performance seems to be the result of a more efficient attention allocation strategy which, in turn, appeared to be the consequence of participants' better understanding of the automation behaviour, implications for future research on human-automation interaction and the development of human-centered automation are drawn.