Agent Transparency for an Autonomous Squad Member

Abstract

The ability to understand the reasoning behind an intelligent agent s actions can help to increase operator performance as the use of human-agent teams for military operations grows. This experiment tested the effect of display design to convey environment and intelligent agent information in a simulation-based unmanned ground vehicle monitoring task. Three groups were tested with visual displays representing 1 of 3 types of information: current status only (group 1); current status with reasoning information (group 2); and current status, reasoning information, and projected information (group 3). Performance measures included comprehension of situation awareness probes, operator trust based on 3 different surveys, workload, and system usability. Results indicated a significant interaction between conditions and pre- and postadministration of a trust survey modified from Jian et al. (2000), with only group 2 increasing in trust preexperiment in comparison with postexperiment. The situation awareness probes failed to yield any significant differences among the conditions. No significant effects of operator workload or individual difference factors were observed across conditions. This research demonstrates the potential of agent transparency displays to improve Soldier trust and situation awareness.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2015
Accession Number
ADA616862

Entities

People

  • Anthony R. Selkowitz
  • Jessie Y. Chen
  • Michael W. Boyce
  • Shan G. Lakhmani

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Cognitive Workload
  • Control Systems
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Human Systems Integration
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Human-Robot Interaction
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Intelligent Agents
  • Psychology
  • Reliability
  • Situational Awareness
  • Surveys
  • Unmanned Ground Vehicles
  • Unmanned Systems
  • Unmanned Vehicles

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Human-Robot Interaction