The antibody identification assistant (AIDA), an example of a cooperative computer support system

Performance when using a critiquing expert system was compared to performance with no decision support for two groups of medical technologists solving antibody identification cases. The treatment group had a significantly lower misdiagnosis rate than the control group across the four cases tested (p<0.000005). This is one of the few studies conducted to evaluate critiquing as a form of decision support for practitioners solving real-world tasks. In particular, there was a trend for improved performance even on a case for which the computer's knowledge was not fully competent. This is in contrast to the usual problems with people not being able to recover from faulty reasoning exhibited by a brittle, partially automated decision support system. Users of critiquing systems are doing the task themselves and given feedback in the context of what they are doing. Thus, the computer can monitor for errors in the human's reasoning, and the human has a basis for judging the computer's reasoning, resulting in cooperative problem-solving between the two decision makers.