AUTOMATION-INDUCED MONITORING INEFFICIENCY - ROLE OF DISPLAY LOCATION

Operators can be poor monitors of automation if they are engaged concu rrently in other tasks. However, in previous studies of this phenomeno n the automated task was always presented in the periphery, away from the primary manual tasks that were centrally displayed. In this study we examined whether centrally locating an automated task would boost m onitoring performance during a flight-simulation task consisting of sy stem monitoring, tracking and fuel resource management sub-tasks. Twel ve nonpilot subjects were required to perform the tracking and fuel ma nagement tasks manually while watching the automated system monitoring task for occasional failures. The automation reliability was constant at 87.5% for six subjects and variable (alternating between 87.5% and 56.25%) for the other six subjects. Each subject completed four 30 mi n sessions over a period of 2 days. In each automation reliability con dition the automation routine was disabled for the last 20 min of the fourth session in order to simulate catastrophic automation failure (0 % reliability). Monitoring for automation failure was inefficient when automation reliability was constant but not when it varied over time, replicating previous results. Furthermore, there was no evidence of r esource or speed accuracy trade-off between tasks. Thus, automation-in duced failures of monitoring cannot be prevented by centrally locating the automated task. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited