Good vibrations: Tactile feedback in support of attention allocation and human-automation coordination in event-driven domains

Observed breakdowns in human-machine communication can be explained, in par t, by the nature of current automation feedback, which relies heavily on fo cal visual attention. Such feedback is not well suited for capturing attent ion in case of unexpected changes and events or for supporting the parallel processing of large amounts of data in complex domains. As suggested by mu ltiple-resource theory, one possible solution to this problem is to distrib ute information across various sensory modalities. A simulator study was co nducted to compare the effectiveness of visual, tactile, and redundant visu al and tactile cues for indicating unexpected changes in the status of an a utomated cockpit system. Both tactile conditions resulted in higher detecti on rates for, and faster response times to, uncommanded mode transitions. T actile feedback did not interfere with, nor was its effectiveness affected by, the performance of concurrent visual tasks. The observed improvement in task-sharing performance indicates that the introduction of tactile feedba ck is a promising avenue toward better supporting human-machine communicati on in event-driven, information-rich domains.