The effects of information and action automation on the complacency phenomenon

Automated systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in our societies. Several authors have identified the existence of the complacency phenomenon in supervision tasks, which imply automation execution or industrial computer support. The purpose of this study was to investigate failures of cooperation between human operator and automation. In this paper, we focused on the complacency as a low degree of suspicion towards the proposals of automation, leading to a monitoring deterioration. The main objective was to compare two types of automation, action automation vs information automation, in complacency. We recruited 96 participants to complete three tasks from the Multi-Attribute Task Battery. We found an effect of two types of automation on performance. Detection rate and reaction time were better when failures were reported by information automation than when it was not reported. Eye movements data showed that the automated task was less monitored when the reliability of information was high. We did not find an effect of reliability on NASA TLX score. Finally, we found that information automation can lead to complacency phenomenon.