Automation reliability and trust: A Bayesian inference approach

Chenlan Wang, Chongjie Zhang, X. Jessie Yang

Abstract: Research shows that over repeated interactions with automation, human operators are able to learn how reliable the automation is and update their trust in automation. The goal of the present study is to investigate if this learning and inference process approximately follow the principle of Bayesian probabilistic inference. First, we applied Bayesian inference to estimate human operators’ perceived system reliability and found high correlations between the Bayesian estimates and the perceived reliability for the majority of the participants. We then correlated the Bayesian estimates with human operators’ reported trust and found moderate correlations for a large portion of the participants. Our results suggest that human operators’ learning and inference process for automation reliability can be approximated by Bayesian inference.