Effects of Training and Automation Reliability on Monitoring Performance in a Flight Simulation Task

The phenomenon of ‘complacency’ in highly reliable systems under multiple task situations has been demonstrated in several studies. The ‘complacency’ effect has been attributed to operators trusting reliable automation and not devoting sufficient attentional resources to monitoring the automated system. It has been reported that subjects exhibited poorer monitoring performance under constant reliability than under variable reliability automation while subjects received short (10-min) manual training on multi-tasks before monitoring the automated task. Extended training on multiple tasks may be required to allow subjects to develop time-sharing skill. Manual training of short duration could be one of the potential factors leading to complacency. To investigate the effects of training on monitoring performance, the present study varied the amount of manual training prior to the automated blocks. It was hypothesized that increased manual training would enhance monitoring performance under constant reliability compared to variable reliability automation. Results indicated that extended manual training could not reduce automation-induced complacency.