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Testing The Lumberjack Analogy: Automation, Situational Awareness, And Mental Workload, Justin W. Morgan

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This study examines the effects of automation on the human user of that automation. Automation has been shown to produce a variety of benefits to employees in terms of performance and a reduction of workload, but research in this area indicates that this might be at the cost of situational awareness. This loss of situational awareness is thought to lead to “out-of-the-loop” performance effects. One way this set of effects has been explained is through the “lumberjack” analogy, which suggests these effects are related to degree of automation and automation failure. This study recreates the effects of automation on mental …