Issues Related to Experience & Automated Agent Technology in Synthetic Task Performance

The U.S. Air Force’s E-3 AWACS is a highly mobile early warning platform providing both surveillance and command and control functions for tactical and air defense forces. The weapons suite within the AWACS is occupied by multiple weapons directors (WD) and a Senior Director (SD), is critical to mission success. The cognitive demand placed on these team members is extremely high. Elliott, Stoyen and Chaiken (2000) note the limits of human cognitive processing relative to this demand and suggest agent technology has the potential to offer effective information and decision support the human operator. This paper examines relationships among experience, performance and the use of agent technology in a decision support role within a synthetic task. We first examine experience related factors leading to utilization of the agent, and subsequently explore the relationship between experience and performance, and how the presence of an automated agent might impact that relationship. Two interesting findings are presented: 1) differences in qualitative experience impact the degree to which weapons directors utilize agent assistance, and 2) the nature of the experience – performance relationship changes when agent assistance is available