Investigating the Effects of Perceived Teammate Artificiality on Human Performance and Cognition

This study found that participants perceiving their third teammate as artificial performed worse than those perceiving them as human. Furthermore, these performance differences were significantly moderated by the task’s difficulty, with participants in the AI teammate condition significantly outperforming participants perceiving a human teammate in the highest difficulty task, which diverges from previous human-AI teaming literature. Alternatively, no significant effect of perceived teammate artificiality was found on shared mental model similarity. However, it did significantly affect participants’ levels of perceived team cognition. Individual performance on medium difficulty maps also mediated the effect of perceived teammate artificiality on perceived team cognition. These results further build on the current understanding of how AI teammates impact perceptions of individual human teammates and how those perceptions subsequently impact their objective performance, which is critical in building more effective AI teammates to incorporate alongside humans.