  Robotic and Autonomous Agricultural Technologies (RAAT) are increasingly
available yet may fail to be adopted. This paper focusses specifically on
cognitive factors that affect adoption including: inability to generate trust,
loss of farming knowledge and reduced social cognition. It is recommended that
agriculture develops its own framework for the performance and safety of RAAT
drawing on human factors research in aerospace engineering including human
inputs (individual variance in knowledge, skills, abilities, preferences, needs
and traits), trust, situational awareness and cognitive load. The kinds of
cognitive impacts depend on the RAATs level of autonomy, ie whether it has
automatic, partial autonomy and autonomous functionality and stage of adoption,
ie adoption, initial use or post-adoptive use. The more autonomous a system is,
the less a human needs to know to operate it and the less the cognitive load,
but it also means farmers have less situational awareness about on farm
activities that in turn may affect strategic decision-making about their
enterprise. Some cognitive factors may be hidden when RAAT is first adopted but
play a greater role during prolonged or intense post-adoptive use. Systems with
partial autonomy need intuitive user interfaces, engaging system information,
and clear signaling to be trusted with low level tasks; and to compliment and
augment high order decision-making on farm.
