Human-Automation Interaction and Safety

When people work alongside automated systems—whether a lane-keeping assistant or a fully self-driving car—their safety depends not just on the technology's reliability but on how well they understand, trust, and stay mentally engaged with it. Researchers in human-automation interaction examine how drivers allocate attention, how cognitive load shifts when a machine takes over routine tasks, and why people sometimes over-trust or under-trust automation in ways that lead to accidents. A central puzzle is how to preserve adequate situation awareness in a human who is no longer actively driving but may need to reclaim control in seconds. Active work is also probing how trust can be calibrated more precisely—so that users extend confidence in proportion to a system's actual competence rather than its perceived sophistication.

Works

79,196

Total citations

873,454

Keywords

TrustAutomationDriver DistractionMental WorkloadSituation AwarenessAutonomous Vehicles