Delegating to Automation

Abstract

We have advocated adaptable automation approaches—those in which the human retains the role of instructing and tasking—and specifically have used the metaphor of a sports team’s “playbook”. Several prior experiments have shown benefits to flexible play calling, so the present work focuses on performance in “non-optimal play environments” (NOPEs) where the defined plays are a poor fit resulting in a need to either modify them dynamically (provide additional instruction) or to abandon play-level automation and resort to more manual levels of control. We might expect that prolonged play usage under optimal conditions would result in automation complacency effects and even loss of training. In two reported experiments, we find little evidence for complacency effects and, instead, show that having access to plays sometimes provides benefits even during NOPE intervals where they were not (directly) useful.