Less is More: How Individual Differences in Multi-tasking Ability Interact with Low-Degree Automation to Determine Task Performance, Cognitive Workload, and Situation Awareness

This thesis aims to examine why automation benefits task performance and whether some people benefit from automation differently to others. Traditionally such questions have invested the nature of the automation (what type of automation is best for a task?) However, such perspectives do not account for a critical component in the system; the human operator. This thesis will test a novel framework that investigates whether profiling an operator’s multi-tasking ability can predict their performance when using automation that assists that cognitive ability in a simulated air traffic control task. Performance outcomes assessed include workload, situation awareness and task performance measures.