Trust rises, attention falls: divergent effects of exposure and education in driving automation
DOI: 10.3389/fcomp.2026.1772813
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Summary
This study investigates how brief educational interventions influence driver trust, attention, and takeover readiness during Level 2 driving automation. The research addresses the challenge of supervisory attention, where prolonged exposure to reliable automation can lead to mind-wandering and reduced vigilance, while miscalibrated trust may cause overreliance or disuse. Given that real-world onboarding for such systems is often minimal, the authors examined whether targeted pre-drive instruction could shape mental models and mitigate attentional drift. The experiment employed a between-subjects design with 55 licensed drivers who had no prior hands-on experience with Level 2 automation. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three educational conditions: Basic (minimal instruction reflecting standard onboarding), capability-focused (Knowledge-based, explaining system functions and sensing), or limitation-focused (Rule-based, highlighting system boundaries and required driver actions). Each participant completed a 15-minute automated highway drive. Trust was measured at four time points, while additional metrics included self-reported mind-wandering, eye-tracking data for gaze behavior, and takeover reaction times. The results indicated that trust increased significantly over time in all groups, regardless of educational framing, suggesting that direct experience with system performance is the primary driver of trust formation. However, educational framing significantly affected monitoring and response behaviors. Capability-focused education enhanced monitoring of the human-machine interface on two false discovery rate-corrected metrics and produced faster takeover reactions compared to limitation-focused education, with no significant difference observed between capability-focused and Basic conditions. Across all participants, greater growth in trust correlated with higher levels of mind-wandering. Conversely, more structured gaze patterns were associated with lower mind-wandering, indicating that visual engagement helps maintain attentional focus. The findings clarify the distinct roles of experience and education in supervising automation. While experience primarily builds trust, brief education selectively sharpens attention and response readiness. Specifically, capability-focused instruction appears more effective than limitation-focused instruction in improving monitoring and takeover performance in this context. These results have implications for driver training programs, human-machine interface design, and gaze-based monitoring systems, suggesting that educational content emphasizing system capabilities may better support safe supervision during Level 2 automation than content focusing solely on limitations.
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| extract | success | pdftotext | — | — | 4 | 2026-08-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-nvidia | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 17 | 2026-08-11 |
| verify | partial | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-nvidia on 2026-08-10; verification: verified_with_issues.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- trust calibration
- automation
- automation surprise
- situational awareness
- trust in automation foundations
- automation complacency bias
Information type
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- Empirical Findings: self report data
- Theoretical Contribution: theory or model, conceptual framework