A Study on the Influence of Personality on the Performance of Teleoperation Tasks in Different Situations

Personality is considered as one of the internal potential influencing factors of performance and an effective index to predict job performance. Past literature reveals the relationship between personality and task performance, and there is evidence that personality can effectively predict teleoperation task performance. In this study, we aim to explore the impact of personality on teleoperation performance under different situations, and to provide theoretical reference for operator selection. In this study, 96 male participants with no teleoperation experience were recruited. Their personalities were evaluated by the Big Five Inventory. The experimental task is to remotely operate a virtual machine car to complete the designated task, each task will have different levels of latency and clearance. Completion time, distance, collisions, and workload were used as indicators of teleoperation performance. Hierarchical Linear Model was used to test the relationship between personality and teleoperation performance. The results showed that with more clearance and longer latency, the number of collisions in higher extroversion participants significantly increased, while in higher negative emotionality participants, the scores decreased significantly. With more clearance, the workload of participants with higher extroversion scores decreased significantly. Further analysis found that energy level and depression were the main sub-dimensions leading to the increase in the number of collisions among the subjects with high score of extroversion and negative emotionality. With longer latency, the completion time of the participants with higher degree of anxiety increased significantly. The results showed that personality have different predictive effects on teleoperation task performance in different situations. These results may be helpful to the selection of operators.