Do individual differences matter in technologically advanced control rooms?

Technologically advanced control rooms (advanced control rooms) automate tasks, reducing human intervention and enabling operators to offload cognitive work. Theoretically, this creates a high situational strength through situational clarity and consistency, reducing variance in operator idiosyncratic behavior. Yet prior research shows that individual differences continue to shape operators' performance, raising questions about how human variability interacts with the affordances of the advanced control room. Given the increasing automation and digitalization of control rooms, there is a renewed need to understand the human-factors dimensions of operator experience, particularly how individual differences influence control room performance. A critical realist analytic framework was used to analyse data from semi-structured interviews with nine licensed U.S. nuclear power plant operators after their participation in simulations. We identify underlying mechanisms that link operators' experiences to deeper structural and psychological factors. Our findings indicate that advanced control rooms contain the well-known demands of traditional control rooms. In addition, they require control room operators to rely on their individual pattern recognition abilities, handle emergent risks embedded in the 'black box' automated systems, and shift roles. Changes in staffing models further alter teamwork demands, underscoring the need for self-regulation at the individual and team levels in stressful situations. These insights reveal that although advanced control rooms function as strong situations, they also contain grey situations, moments in which individual differences meaningfully shape outcomes. Recognizing these interactions is essential for designing interfaces that better support human cognition, developing training that prepares operators for uncertainty, and updating analysis methods to reflect the realities of work in advanced control rooms.

Keywords: Human-technology interaction, Human performance, Individual differences factor, technologically advanced control room, nuclear power plants.