The impact of a decision support tool designed to embed contextual mission factors was investigated. Contextual information may enable operators to infer the appropriateness of data underlying the automation’s algorithm.

Research has shown the costs of imperfect automation are more detrimental than perfectly reliable automation when operators are provided with decision support tools. Operators may trust and rely on the automation more appropriately if they understand the automation’s algorithm. The need to develop decision support tools that are understandable to the operator provides the rationale for the current experiment.

A total of 17 participants performed a simulated rapid retasking of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets task with manual, decision automation, or contextual decision automation differing in two levels of task demand: low or high. Automation reliability was set at 80%, resulting in participants experiencing a mixture of reliable and automation failure trials. Dependent variables included ISR coverage and response time of replanning routes.

Reliable automation significantly improved ISR coverage when compared with manual performance. Although performance suffered under imperfect automation, contextual decision automation helped to reduce some of the decrements in performance.

Contextual information helps overcome the costs of imperfect decision automation.

Designers may mitigate some of the performance decrements experienced with imperfect automation by providing operators with interfaces that display contextual information, that is, the state of factors that affect the reliability of the automation’s recommendation.