The role of automation etiquette and task-criticality on performance, workload, automation reliance, and user confidence.

Previous research suggests good automation etiquette can yield positive effects on user performance, trust, automation reliance, and user confidence - especially in personified or anthropomorphized technologies. The current study examined the impact of automation etiquette and task-criticality in non-personified technology. The study used a computer-based automation task to examine good and bad automation etiquette models and different domain-based task-criticality levels (between-subjects) that contained various stages of automation (stage 2 and stage 3) and automation reliability levels (60% and 80%) (within-subjects).

Polite AI mitigates user susceptibility to AI hallucinations.

With their increased capability, AI-based chatbots have become increasingly popular tools to help users answer complex queries. However, these chatbots may hallucinate, or generate incorrect but very plausible-sounding information, more frequently than previously thought. Thus, it is crucial to examine strategies to mitigate human susceptibility to hallucinated output.

Nature and measurement of attention control.

Individual differences in the ability to control attention are correlated with a wide range of important outcomes, from academic achievement and job performance to health behaviors and emotion regulation. Nevertheless, the theoretical nature of attention control as a cognitive construct has been the subject of heated debate, spurred on by psychometric issues that have stymied efforts to reliably measure differences in the ability to control attention. For theory to advance, our measures must improve.

The Relevance of Attention Control, Not Working Memory, in Human Factors.

Objective: Discuss the human factors relevance of attention control (AC), a domain-general ability to regulate information processing functions in the service of goal-directed behavior.

Background: Working memory (WM) measures appear as predictors in various applied psychology studies. However, measures of WM reflect a mixture of memory storage and controlled attention making it difficult to interpret the meaning of significant WM-task relations for human factors.

Towards Ethical AI: Empirically Investigating Dimensions of AI Ethics, Trust Repair, and Performance in Human-AI Teaming.

Objective: Determining the efficacy of two trust repair strategies (apology and denial) for trust violations of an ethical nature by an autonomous teammate.

Background: While ethics in human-AI interaction is extensively studied, little research has investigated how decisions with ethical implications impact trust and performance within human-AI teams and their subsequent repair.

Method: Forty teams of two participants and one autonomous teammate completed three team missions within a synthetic task environment.

Enhancing component-specific trust with consumer automated systems through humanness design.

Consumer automation is a suitable venue for studying the efficacy of untested humanness design methods for promoting specific trust in multi-component systems. Subjective (trust, self-confidence) and behavioural (use, manual override) measures were recorded as 82 participants interacted with a four-component automation-bearing system in a simulated smart home task for two experimental blocks. During the first block all components were perfectly reliable (100%).

The role of attention control in complex real-world tasks.

Working memory capacity is an important psychological construct, and many real-world phenomena are strongly associated with individual differences in working memory functioning. Although working memory and attention are intertwined, several studies have recently shown that individual differences in the general ability to control attention is more strongly predictive of human behavior than working memory capacity. In this review, we argue that researchers would therefore generally be better suited to studying the role of attention control rather than memory-based abilities in explaining real-world behavior and performance in humans.

Near-Perfect Automation: Investigating Performance, Trust, and Visual Attention Allocation.

Objective: Assess performance, trust, and visual attention during the monitoring of a near-perfect automated system.

Background: Research rarely attempts to assess performance, trust, and visual attention in near-perfect automated systems even though they will be relied on in high-stakes environments.

Methods: Seventy-three participants completed a 40-min supervisory control task where they monitored three search feeds.

Factors that affect younger and older adults' causal attributions of robot behaviour.

Stereotypes are cognitive shortcuts that facilitate efficient social judgments about others. Just as causal attributions affect perceptions of people, they may similarly affect perceptions of technology, particularly anthropomorphic technology such as robots. In a scenario-based study, younger and older adults judged the performance and capability of an anthropomorphised robot that appeared young or old.

Detecting automation failures in a simulated supervisory control environment.

The goal of this research was to determine how individuals perform and allocate their visual attention when monitoring multiple automated displays that differ in automation reliability. Ninety-six participants completed a simulated supervisory control task where each automated display had a different level of reliability (namely 70%, 85% and 95%). In addition, participants completed a high and low workload condition.

Looking for Age Differences in Self-Driving Vehicles: Examining the Effects of Automation Reliability, Driving Risk, and Physical Impairment on Trust.

Purpose: Self-driving cars are an extremely high level of autonomous technology and represent a promising technology that may help older adults safely maintain independence. However, human behavior with automation is complex and not straightforward (Parasuraman and Riley, 1997; Parasuraman, 2000; Rovira et al., 2007; Parasuraman and Wickens, 2008; Parasuraman and Manzey, 2010; Parasuraman et al.

From 'automation' to 'autonomy': the importance of trust repair in human-machine interaction.

Modern interactions with technology are increasingly moving away from simple human use of computers as tools to the establishment of human relationships with autonomous entities that carry out actions on our behalf. In a recent commentary, Peter Hancock issued a stark warning to the field of human factors that attention must be focused on the appropriate design of a new class of technology: highly autonomous systems. In this article, we heed the warning and propose a human-centred approach directly aimed at ensuring that future human-autonomy interactions remain focused on the user's needs and preferences.

The effect of individual differences in working memory in older adults on performance with different degrees of automated technology.

A leading hypothesis to explain older adults' overdependence on automation is age-related declines in working memory. However, it has not been empirically examined. The purpose of the current experiment was to examine how working memory affected performance with different degrees of automation in older adults.

Effects of Information Visualization on Older Adults' Decision-Making Performance in a Medicare Plan Selection Task: A Comparative Usability Study.

Background: Technology gains have improved tools for evaluating complex tasks by providing environmental supports (ES) that increase ease of use and improve performance outcomes through the use of information visualizations (info-vis). Complex info-vis emphasize the need to understand individual differences in abilities of target users, the key cognitive abilities needed to execute a decision task, and the graphical elements that can serve as the most effective ES. Older adults may be one such target user group that would benefit from increased ES to mitigate specific declines in cognitive abilities.

Selective attention as a protagonist in contemporary workplace stress: implications for the interruption age.

Background And Objectives: The ubiquity of instant messages and email notifications in contemporary work environments has opened a Pandora's Box. This box is filled with countless interruptions coming from laptops, smartphones, and other devices, all of which constantly call for employees' attention. In this interruption era, workplace stress is a pervasive problem.

A multi-level analysis of the effects of age and gender stereotypes on trust in anthropomorphic technology by younger and older adults.

Unlabelled: Previous research has shown that gender stereotypes, elicited by the appearance of the anthropomorphic technology, can alter perceptions of system reliability. The current study examined whether stereotypes about the perceived age and gender of anthropomorphic technology interacted with reliability to affect trust in such technology. Participants included a cross-section of younger and older adults.

Decision support aids with anthropomorphic characteristics influence trust and performance in younger and older adults.

This study examined the use of deliberately anthropomorphic automation on younger and older adults' trust, dependence and performance on a diabetes decision-making task. Research with anthropomorphic interface agents has shown mixed effects in judgments of preferences but has rarely examined effects on performance. Meanwhile, research in automation has shown some forms of anthropomorphism (e.

Developing a usability evaluation tool to assess the patient room bathroom.

Objective: The goal of this project was to create an easy-to-administer and inexpensive tool that can help identify usability issues in a patient room bathroom during the design process so improvements can be made before the final product is constructed and put into operation.

Background: The bathroom is an essential part of any hospital patient room, yet it is associated with nurse dissatisfaction and patient falls. Minimal literature has examined whether the physical structure of various elements within the bathroom are efficient, safe, and satisfactory for the majority of users.

Using a task analysis to describe nursing work in acute care patient environments.

To improve the healthcare environment where nurses work and patients receive care, it is necessary to understand the elements that define the healthcare environment. Primary elements include (a) the occupants of the room and what knowledge, skills, and abilities they bring to the situation; (b) what tasks the occupants will be doing in the room; and (c) the characteristics of the built environment. To better understand these components, a task analysis from human factor research was conducted to study nurses as they cared for hospitalized patients.

Age-sensitive design of online health information: comparative usability study.

Background: Older adults' health maintenance may be enhanced by having access to online health information. However, usability issues may prevent older adults from easily accessing such information. Prior research has shown that aging is associated with a unique pattern of cognitive changes, and knowledge of these changes may be used in the design of health websites for older adults.

The role of spatial abilities and age in performance in an auditory computer navigation task.

Age-related differences in spatial ability have been suggested as a mediator of age-related differences in computer-based task performance. However, the vast majority of tasks studied have primarily used a visual display (e.g.

Designing an information search interface for younger and older adults.

Objective: The present study examined Web-based information retrieval as a function of age for two information organization schemes: hierarchical organization and one organized around tags or keywords.

Background: Older adults' performance in information retrieval tasks has traditionally been lower compared with younger adults'. The current study examined the degree to which information organization moderated age-related performance differences on an information retrieval task.

Spatial ability subfactors and their influences on a computer-based information search task.

Objective: The present study examined the relationship between two distinct subfactors of spatial ability and performance in an information search task modeled on browsing the Web.

Background: Previous studies have found relationships between various measures of spatial ability and performance in a wide variety of computer-based tasks.

Method: In the search task 101 participants (18-29 years of age) searched for the answer to a question by navigating the system.

Touch a screen or turn a knob: choosing the best device for the job.

Input devices enable users to interact with systems. In two experiments, we assessed whether and how task demands and user age influenced task performance for a direct input device (touch screen) and an indirect input device (rotary encoder). In Experiment 1, 40 younger (18-28 years) and 40 middle-aged to older adults (51-65 years) performed tasks using controls such as sliders, up/down buttons, list boxes, and text boxes while using a system.