Human teaming changes driven by expectations of a synthetic teammate

Current automation that behaves as a teammate may be rejected by human teammates due to a lack of human-like mental models, a sense of self, essential communication and coordination abilities, and trustworthiness. This experiment was conducted with all-human teams to 1) establish baseline team performance and communication data for later comparison with human-synthetic teams and 2) to understand how human teammate behavior changes when human teammates believe they are interacting with a synthetic teammate. The teams that were told that the human Air Vehicle Operator (AVO) was synthetic liked the AVO more, perceived less workload, and gave the AVO more suggestions compared to teams told that the AVO was a remote human. These effects speak to human expectations regarding synthetic teammates or more generally, automation.