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This report summarizes activity from the first year of a three-year project on aiding decision making in human-system interface. This report includes description of a new adaptive automation design model, allowing system designers the ability to visually and systematically evaluate the placement of adaptive automation within a system network. This model aids the designer to isolate the tasks, which require human decision making, ideally permitting tasks to be automated which do not require human decisions. A tool for evaluating adaptive automation, referred to as Space Navigator has been developed. This game has been designed using the model, has allowed us (and future researchers) to simplify data gathering from human participants. The resulting automation system will allow for research into how similarity and difference of actions between a human-machine team affect the overall performance of the system. The final experimental data will provide several areas of further research including trust in automation, training improvement, workload reduction (actual and perceived), and task load switching., The original document contains color images.

The objective of this study was to determine if eye and head based psychophysiological cues can be used to maintain screener vigilance levels during long duration tasks. In two parts, this study first explored which cues are predictive of vigilance levels. The second part of the study developed a vigilance feedback system using the cues established in part one and compared the results of subjects using the feedback system with those subjects having received no feedback or those who received random feedback.In part one, 48 participants reviewed 600 simulated x-rays to determine if any hazardous items (guns or knives) were present. Individual vigilance levels were determined by scoring the number of correct detections during eight 5-minute periods (total study length = 40 minutes). Using an eye-tracking machine, four concurrent eye and head activity measures (blinks, saccades, pupil diameter, and head position) were used to model changes in vigilance level throughout a simulated baggage screening task. At the end of the study, changes in blink and saccade rates proved to be significant predictors of an individual's ability to detect the presence of these hazardous items among other non-significant baggage items.Part two required 126 participants equally distributed across three conditions to repeat the same screening task. For one condition the monitoring system, instead of passively recording the individual's cues, provided near real-time feedback of vigilance levels to a condition. Participants in other conditions received random feedback on their vigilance levels while a third group received no feedback. At the conclusion of the study the subjects who received the real-time feedback performed significantly better than those who received no feedback. However, they did not perform better than the subjects who received random feedback. Perhaps more significantly, the subjects who received random feedback, while performing better than the no feedback group, also experi

This study focused on improving viglance performance through developing methods to arouse subjects to the possibility of errors in a data manipulation information warfare attack. The study suggests that by continuously applying arousal stimuli, subjects would retain initially high vigilance levels thereby avoiding the vigilance decrement phenomenon and improving error detection. The research focused on which methods were the most effective as well the impact of age upon the arousability of the subjects. Further the implications of vigilance and vigilance decrement for correct detections as well as productivity were explored. The study used a simulation experiment to provide a vigilance task in an reality-based information warfare environment. The results of the study suggest that stimuli type aid age do impact arousal, although stimuli type had the greater effect. Also, moderate support was found to indicate that arousal does affect vigilance and vigilance decrement. However, the final analysis revealed that it was the arousal-vigilance interaction That had the greatest impact on correct detection and productivity.