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About

Caroline E. Harriott is a human factors and robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, cognitive psychology, and team performance modeling. Her research has made substantial contributions to understanding how humans collaborate with robotic systems, spanning individual cognitive responses, team dynamics, and large-scale swarm interactions. Harriott's most influential work examines the psychological dimensions of human-robot interaction, notably her exploration of cognitive dissonance as a window into how people reconcile prior knowledge about machines with lived interaction experiences (41 citations). Equally significant is her sustained focus on human workload — both mental and physical — in collaborative and supervisory human-robot teams, producing diagnostic algorithms and measurement frameworks designed for high-stakes environments such as emergency response and space operations (28 and 27 citations respectively). Her contributions extend to the emerging field of human-swarm interaction, where she developed biologically-inspired metrics and heuristic evaluation tools to help operators make sense of large, complex robotic collectives (27 and 18 citations). Across more than a decade of research, Harriott has consistently bridged theoretical modeling and practical deployment considerations, offering the robotics community rigorous, human-centered tools for designing safer and more effective human-robot systems.