The Role of the Computer in Team Problem-Solving: Critiquing or Partial Automation?

A testbed was developed for studying the effects of different computer system designs on human-computer team problem-solving, using the real-world task of antibody identification. The computer interface was designed so that practitioners could solve antibody identification cases using the computer as they normally would using paper and pencil. A rule-base was then encoded into the computer such that it had knowledge for applying a heuristic strategy that is often helpful for solving cases. With this testbed, studies have been run comparing different computer system designs. A critiquing system was found to be better than a partially automated system on cases where the computer's knowledge is incompetent.