Timing within human-agent interaction and its effects on team performance and human behavior

Abstract

Current systems incorporating human-agent interaction typically place the human in a supervisory role and the agent as a subordinate. However, a key aspect of teaming is the dynamic shift in roles. Depending on the situation at hand, teaming could lead to a peer relationship where the human and agent are working together on the same task. This research investigates how the timing of agent actions impacts team performance, as well as human workload and behavior. A human-in-the-loop experiment demonstrated that when the agent performs tasks faster than the human, the human tends to become reliant upon the automation and assumes a supervisory role. A human performance model predicts that extending agent execution time will decrease human reliance on the automation. However, in the environment under investigation, a tradeoff exists between team performance and human involvement.