Have a Heart: Predictability of Trust in an Autonomous Agent Teammate through Team-Level Measures of Heart Rate Synchrony and Arousal

摘要

Progression toward sophisticated machines with the capacity to act as partners in tactical and strategic situations means that human operators will increasingly rely on collaborative input from agent teammates (e.g., Masiello, 2013). However, plans to team autonomous agents with humans raise new questions regarding the effects that such teammates might have on important team psychological processes, such as team cognition and trust. Specifically, it is not known how modifications in team structure, such as changes in team size, influence team dynamics and psychological processes when the team includes an artificial agent, nor how trust established in such teams transfers to new environments, nor how measures that have been used to predict trust in humans generalize to agent teammates. Our current research examined these effects through the detection and analysis of an objective team phenomenon known as physio-behavioral coupling (PBC) using Multidimensional Recurrence Quantification Analysis (MdRQA; Wallot, Roepstorff, and M?nster, 2016) of shared physiological arousal during initial team formation and training. In particular, as shared physiological arousal measured in changing heart rhythms within human teams has been shown to be associated with measures of trust (Mitkidis, McGraw, Roepstorff, & Wallot, 2015) and concern for others (Konvalinka et al., 2011), we investigated how shared physiological arousal predicts willingness to trust an agent teammate in a novel task environment.