Modeling Relationships among Workload, Trust, and Visual Scanning in an Automated Flight Task

The present study explored relationships among operators’ workload, subjective trust, and visual scanning patterns during their interaction with imperfect automation in a low-fidelity flight simulation task. Participants performed both a manual tracking task and a secondary system monitoring task (automated; FA- vs. miss-prone) under high and low load conditions manipulated by central task demand. The high load condition produced, 1) less frequent saccades toward system monitoring, 2) greater subjective workload, and 3) lower levels of subjective trust, compared to the low load condition. A mediation analysis revealed that subjective workload mediated the effect of load on visual scanning patterns whereas subjective trust did not. The results imply that, when the central task demands more attention, operators strategically reduce sampling rates of information from the system monitoring task assisted by imperfect automation depending on their subjective workload but not on subjective trust.