Agent Transparency, Situation Awareness, Mental Workload, and Operator Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

In this review, we investigate the relationship between agent transparency, Situation Awareness, mental workload, and operator performance for safety critical domains.

The advancement of highly sophisticated automation across safety critical domains poses a challenge for effective human oversight. Automation transparency is a design principle that could support humans by making the automation's inner workings observable (i.e., "seeing-into"). However, experimental support for this has not been systematically documented to date.

Based on the PRISMA method, a broad and systematic search of the literature was performed focusing on identifying empirical research investigating the effect of transparency on central Human Factors variables.

Our final sample consisted of 17 experimental studies that investigated transparency in a controlled setting. The studies typically employed three human-automation interaction types: responding to agent-generated proposals, supervisory control of agents, and monitoring only. There is an overall trend in the data pointing towards a beneficial effect of transparency. However, the data reveals variations in Situation Awareness, mental workload, and operator performance for specific tasks, agent-types, and level of integration of transparency information in primary task displays.

Our data suggests a promising effect of automation transparency on Situation Awareness and operator performance, without the cost of added mental workload, for instances where humans respond to agent-generated proposals and where humans have a supervisory role.

Strategies to improve human performance when interacting with intelligent agents should focus on allowing humans to see into its information processing stages, considering the integration of information in existing Human Machine Interface solutions.