Shared Mental Models as a Way of Managing Transparency in Complex Human-Autonomy Teaming

Abstract

This paper argues that because of the cognitive and communication limitations of human and autonomous agents engaged in Human-Autonomy Teaming within dynamic environments, various external factors, which can be classified collectively as environment complexity, set boundaries to the effectiveness of strategies for agent transparency – that is, the ability of autonomous agents to make human actors aware of their goals, actions, reasoning, and expectations of future states. Understanding the mechanisms by which changes in environment complexity affect transparency, and the conditions in which it can be disrupted, can help researchers to better frame the results of existing and future studies on transparency and, in turn, inform the development of strategies to modify autonomous agents’ behaviour to maintain transparency under different environment conditions. It is proposed that one such strategy could be the adjustment of the level of abstraction of the shared mental model adopted by the team as the common ground for communication so as to keep the amount of information that is exchanged manageable within human cognitive limitations.