Effects of Automation Reliability and Trust on System Monitoring Performance in Simulated Flight Tasks

The current study was designed to empirically examine the effects of trust and automation reliability on multi-tasking performance in a simulated cockpit setting using the Multi-Attribute Task Battery II (MATB-II). The MATB-II simulates tasks often performed by pilots in-flight, tasking the operator with attending to automated systems and correcting errors when they inevitably occur. Over the course of three 30-minute trials, two levels of automation reliability were presented in the current study (R50% and R90%). It was hypothesized that automation reliability and trust would affect both workload and performance in this multi-tasking environment. Results indicated that reliability significantly affected monitoring performance on the MATB-II. More reliable automation resulted in poorer monitoring performance, while trust appeared to have little impact. These results provide further evidence for how operators trust and interact with automation, a topic that is relevant to the implementation of automated systems in a variety of human-machine systems such as aviation.