Zhang Hanshu, Zhou Ran, Cheng Cheng-You, Huang Sheng-Hsu, Cheng Ming-Hui, Yang Cheng-Ta
Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior (CCNU), Ministry of Education, 152 Luoyu Road, Hongshan District, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei, China.
Key Laboratory of Human Development and Mental Health of Hubei Province, School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, China.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2025 Jul 30;10(1):44. doi: 10.1186/s41235-025-00659-w.
Although it is commonly believed that automation aids human decision-making, conflicting evidence raises questions about whether individuals would gain greater advantages from automation in difficult tasks. Our study examines the combined influence of task difficulty and automation reliability on aided decision-making. We assessed decision efficiency by employing the single-target self-terminating (STST) capacity coefficient in Systems Factorial Technology, estimating the ratio of performance with aided information to that without it. Participants were instructed to perform a shape categorization task, wherein they assessed whether the presented stimulus belonged to one category or another. In Experiment 1, three automation reliability conditions (high reliability, low reliability, and unaided) were tested in separate blocks. Our results indicated that, in general, participants exhibited unlimited capacity when provided with valid automated cues, implying that the decision efficiency was unaltered by automated assistance. Despite the failure to gain extra efficiency, the benefits of automated aids in decision-making for difficult tasks were evident. In Experiment 2, various types of automation reliability were randomly intermixed. In this scenario, the impact of automation reliability on participants' performance diminished; however, the significance of information accuracy increased. Our study illustrates how the presentation of automation, its reliability, and task difficulty interactively influence participants' processing of automated information for decision-making. Our study may improve processing efficiency in automated systems, hence facilitating superior interface design and automation execution.
尽管人们普遍认为自动化有助于人类决策，但相互矛盾的证据引发了关于个体在困难任务中是否能从自动化中获得更大优势的疑问。我们的研究考察了任务难度和自动化可靠性对辅助决策的综合影响。我们通过在系统因子技术中采用单目标自终止（STST）能力系数来评估决策效率，估计有辅助信息时与无辅助信息时的绩效比率。参与者被指示执行一项形状分类任务，即评估所呈现的刺激属于一个类别还是另一个类别。在实验1中，在单独的组块中测试了三种自动化可靠性条件（高可靠性、低可靠性和无辅助）。我们的结果表明，总体而言，当提供有效的自动提示时，参与者表现出无限的能力，这意味着决策效率不受自动辅助的影响。尽管未能获得额外的效率，但自动化辅助在困难任务决策中的益处是明显的。在实验2中，各种类型的自动化可靠性被随机混合。在这种情况下，自动化可靠性对参与者表现的影响减弱；然而，信息准确性的重要性增加了。我们的研究说明了自动化的呈现、其可靠性和任务难度如何交互地影响参与者对用于决策的自动信息的处理。我们的研究可能会提高自动化系统中的处理效率，从而促进更好的界面设计和自动化执行。
