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.