The Importance of Determining Individual Operator Capabilities When Applying Adaptive Aiding

Abstract

Performance was significantly improved in an Uninhabited Air Vehicle (UAV) task when individually determined task difficulty levels were used to present psychophysiologically controlled adaptive aiding. Previous research in our laboratory demonstrated that the benefit of adaptive aiding varied according to the operator's skill level when a common task difficulty was used for all operators. In the present study the difficult task level was determined for each operator. An average task difficulty level was also used. The best performance occurred when adaptive aiding was presented based upon psychophysiological data submitted to an artificial neural network when the implementation level was individually determined for each operator. Performance improvement using the mean difficulty level was lower as were the results when the adaptive aiding was randomly presented. Individual cognitive capability must be considered to achieve optimal performance via adaptive aiding.