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Leaving Money on the Table: As Diagnostic Aids Become More Useful, Operators Use Them Less Efficiently
DescriptionDiagnostic aids can assist human operators in everyday and high-stakes decision tasks. However, performance typically falls short of best-possible levels, indicating a tendency toward aid disuse. To understand and mitigate disuse, it is important to know how task context influences aided performance. Here, participants (n = 127 students and online respondents) performed a signal detection task with and without support from a diagnostic aid. Task Difficulty and Aid Reliability varied between subjects. Analyses compared observed levels of performance to the predictions of an optimal aid use strategy. Aided performance was consistently suboptimal, but became more inefficient as the aid became more reliable and as the task became more difficult. Costs of disuse to decision accuracy were substantial. These findings replicate and extend earlier patterns of poor diagnostic aid use, and suggest that, aggregated over many operators and decisions, misuse threatens large costs to health, productivity, and safety.
Event Type
Lecture
TimeWednesday, September 11th8:30am - 8:50am MST
LocationFLW Salon C
Tracks
Cognitive Engineering & Decision Making