Effects of Observability, Mood States, and Workload on Human Handling Errors When Monitoring Aircraft Automation

Abstract

An increasing level of automation changes the role of human operators also in the flight deck. Herewith, communication and coordination efforts between humans and automation gain importance as communication breakdowns may cause serious incidents and accidents. To ensure successful communication, it was proposed, on the one hand, to enhance the observability of automation. On the other hand, researchers analysed the impact of inter- and intraindividual differences in affect and mood states on the interaction. Within this study, it was investigated whether an experimental manipulation of the automation’s observability and of workload in addition to interindividual differences in mood states impacted human errors in handling automation. Therefore, 24 participants monitored aircraft automation and, more specifically, whether the automation succeeded in keeping the aircraft’s pitch angle within certain boundaries and whether the aircraft engines functioned as expected. The data analyses revealed significant effects of the automation’s observability and of the participants’ level of positive mood and extraversion on the number of handling errors. The handling errors were considered an indicator for communication breakdowns, as they were caused by the automation insufficiently informing the human on its actions. The results highlight the need to focus on the automation’s observability when designing highly automated systems especially in safety-critical domains and on further analysing the effects of mood states on human-automation interaction.