ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Human-Media Interaction
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2025.1549399
Operator-Agnostic and Real-Time Usable Psychophysiological Models of Trust, Workload, and Situation Awareness
Provisionally accepted
- University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
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Trust, mental workload, and situation awareness (TWSA) are cognitive states important to human performance and human-autonomy teaming. Individual and team performance may be improved if operators can maintain ideal levels of TWSA. Predictions of operator TWSA can inform adaptive autonomy and resource allocation in teams, helping achieve this goal. Current approaches of estimating TWSA, such as questionnaires or behavioral measures, are obtrusive, task-specific, or cannot be used in real-time. Psychophysiological modeling has the potential to overcome these limitations, but prior work is limited in operational feasibility. To help address this gap, we develop psychophysiological models that can be used in real time and that do not rely on operator-specific background information. We assess the impacts of these constraints on the models' performance. Participants (n = 10) performed a human-autonomy teaming task in which they monitored a simulated spacecraft habitat. Regression models using LASSO-based feature selection were fit with an emphasis on model stability and generalizability. We demonstrate functional model fit (Adjusted R 2 : T=0.67, W=0.60, SA=0.85). Furthermore, model performance extends to predictive ability, assessed via leave-one-participant-out cross validation (Q 2 : T=0.58, W=0.46, SA=0.74). This study evaluates model performance to help establish the viability of real-time, operator-agnostic models of TWSA.
Keywords: Psychophysiology, Predictive Modeling, Human-Autonomy teaming, Human-agent teaming, cognitive state
Received: 21 Dec 2024; Accepted: 30 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Richardson, Buchner, Kintz, Clark and Hayman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Erin Elizabeth Richardson, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
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