Have a Heart: Predictability of Trust in an Autonomous Agent Teammate through Team-Level Measures of Heart Rate Synchrony and Arousal
Authors: Tolston Michael T. , Funke Gregory J. , Alarcon Gene M. , Miller Brent , Bowers Margaret A. , Gruenwald Christina , Capiola August 
Published: September 2018

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 Mønster, 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. We conducted an experiment consisting of collecting physio-behavioral data (i.e., heart rate) from teams of different sizes as they performed a series of collaborative, consensus building tasks. The independent variable was team size (teams of 2 or 3 human players, with an artificial agent teammate always present), and there were two separate team-oriented tasks: A first-round consensus-building wagering task, and a second-round task in which teams were able to make wagers on the expected performance of the agent teammate in a subsequent maze running task called Checkmate (Alarcon et al., 2017). We predicted that complimentary combinations of PBC (e.g., measures of overall similarity and stability in heart rate dynamics) obtained from MdRQA, along with self-reported measures of team and agent trust, would be positively related to future trusting behaviors in the agent teammate, and that increasing the number of teammates would result in higher order, more complex structure in the physio- behavioral data that would not be reducible to simpler patterns (e.g., Wallot et al., 2016). To this end, we predicted that measures of self-reported trust and multivariate PBC would be reducible to meaningful lower dimensional structures using principal components analysis (PCA), and that PBC calculated from the first task from the full team, but not from averages aggregated from subsets of the team, would significantly predict trusting behavior in the second task. Ninety-two participants (31 men and 61 women) recruited from the campus of a midwestern university in the U.S. took part in this study (19 dyads and 18 triads). Ages ranged from 18 to 42 ( M = 22, SD = 5.48). The experiment was a univariate (team size; two or three human teammates with an agent teammate always present) between-subjects design. Self-reported measures were collected from each team member before each of the two tasks and included items that measured: Team ability, team benevolence, team integrity, and team trust (adapted from Mayer & Davis, 1999); trust in human teammates (adapted from Naquin & Paulson, 2003); agent competence, cognitive trust in the agent, emotional trust in the agent, intention to delegate to the agent, and intention to adopt the agent as an aid (adapted from Komiak & Benbasat, 2006); and collective efficacy (adapted from Riggs & Knight, 1994). Factor analysis of the composite scales from aggregated survey data indicated the data loaded well onto factors that corresponded to trust in the team and trust in the agent teammate. Factor analysis of MdRQA from the full team and from the averaged lower order analyses showed that each had one component with an eigenvalue greater than what would be expected by chance. Results from analyses using logistic regression to predict Checkmate betting showed that self-reported measures of trust in the agent and MdRQA of full team PBC in the initial task significantly predicted subsequent trusting behavior in an agent teammate in Checkmate, but lower-order PBC estimated from averages of team subgroups did not. These results suggest that multivariate team-level coupling has predictive power in subsequent team outcomes that cannot be fully captured using data aggregated from subgroup averages, and that measures of PBC measured from human teammates is related to trust in an agent teammate. We note two important contributions of the present study. First, that PBC and subjective measures of trust were significant predictors of observed trusting behavior regardless of team size suggests that important team processes and outcomes are at least partially invariant to changes in team size, a promising outcome for the prospect of meaningfully scaling measures of PBC beyond the typical dyadic context. Second, we have shown that shared team- level arousal is a significant predictor of subsequent trusting behavior in an agent teammate in a novel task, demonstrating that these objective measures are extensible to trust in non-human partners.