Investigating the impact of visual environmental uncertainty on human-agent teaming

Sylvain Daronnat, Leif Azzopardi, Martin Halvey

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Uncertainty in Human-Agent interactions is often studied in terms of transparency and understandability of agent actions. Less work, however, has focused on how Visual Environmental Uncertainty (VEU) that restricts or occludes visual information affects the Human-Agent Teaming (HAT) in terms of trust, reliance, performance, cognitive load and situational awareness. We conducted a mixed-design experiment (n=96) where participants interacted with an agent during a collaborative aiming task under four different types of VEUs involving global and dynamic occlusions. Our results show that while environmental uncertainties led to increases in perceived trust, they induced differences in reliance and performance. Counter to intuition, when participants trusted the agent the most, they relied on the agent more, but performed worst. These findings highlight how trust in agents is also influenced by external environmental conditions and suggest that reported trust in HAT scenarios may not always generalize beyond the environmental factors in which they were studied.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1185-1189
Number of pages5
JournalProceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
Volume65
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2021

Keywords

  • human-agent interactions
  • human-agent teaming
  • visual environmental uncertainty

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