Automated Alert Failures and their Impact on Operator Performance and Trust

Despite its rapid advancement, automation remains vulnerable to system failures. The reliability of automation may impact users’ trust and how they interact with it. Additionally, the type of error can uniquely redirect user behavior. This study investigated how reliability and error type impact operator trust and monitoring performance. Participants completed a monitoring task at either 50% or 90% reliability, experiencing either misses or false alarms from an automated alert system. It was hypothesized that automation reliability would impact trust, while error type would also impact reliance and compliance behaviors. Results indicated that misses had a greater impact on monitoring performance than false alarms, while reliability did not influence performance. Trust was not influenced by reliability or error type and showed no relationship with performance measures. These results can help further clarify the way automation failures shape how humans interact with automation and inform the design of future automated systems.