Automation and Complacency: Insights from a Planning Task in the Transportation Domain

Automated systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in our environment. This leads to a new tasks repartition between the human operator and automation. Understanding human-machine cooperation including potential failures has become a hot topic. In this study we focus on a possible negative consequence of automation: the complacency phenomenon. This phenomenon has been repeatedly observed in dynamic situations in which automation execute an action in order to relieve the human operator from his/her activity. In static task, automation often serves to simplify/pre-process the data and not to directly make a decision. The goal of automation in a static task (like planning) is to optimize an external representation and allow the human operator to make his choices more easily. The Eye Tracker is used to understand human behaviors and their strategies in these static situations. The purpose of this study is therefore to compare complacency to “action execution” from complacency to “data simplification”. We confronted 96 participants to these two automation types on the Multi Attribute Task Battery. We also manipulated four levels of automation reliability (0%; 56.25%; 87.5%, 100%). In all these conditions we assessed complacency through the detection rate of automation failure. In addition, we used an eye tracker to assess a potential low level of suspicion regarding automation failure.