“I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That, Dave”; Getting to Know Your Buddies in a Human–Agent Team

The rapid progress in artificial intelligence enables technology to more and more become a partner of humans in a team, rather than being a tool. Even more than in human teams, partners of human–agent teams have different strengths and weaknesses, and they must acknowledge and utilize their respective capabilities. Coordinated team collaboration can be accomplished by smartly designing the interactions within human–agent teams. Such designs are called Team Design Patterns (TDPs). We investigated the effects of a specific TDP on proactive task reassignment. This TDP supports team members to dynamically allocate tasks by utilizing their knowledge about the task demands and about the capabilities of team members. In a pilot study, agent–agent teams were used to study the effectiveness of proactive task reassignment. Results showed that this TDP improves a team’s performance, provided that partners have accurate knowledge representations of each member’s skill level. The main study of this paper addresses the effects of task reassignments in a human–agent team. It was hypothesized that when agents provide explanations when issuing and responding to task reassignment requests, this will enhance the quality of the human’s mental model. Results confirmed that participants developed more accurate mental models when agent-partners provide explanations. This did not result in a higher performance of the human–agent team, however. The study contributes to our understanding of designing effective collaboration in human–agent teams.