Human-AI Teaming Under Deception: An Implicit BCI Safeguards Drone Team Performance in Virtual Reality

Abstract: Human-AI teams can be vulnerable to catastrophic failure when feedback from the AI is incorrect, especially under high cognitive workload. Traditional team aggregation methods, such as voting, are susceptible to these AI errors, which can actively bias the behaviour of each individual and inflate the likelihood of an erroneous group decision. We hypothesised that a collaborative Brain-Computer Interface (cBCI) using neural activity collected before a behavioural decision is made can provide a source of information that is decoupled from this biased behaviour, thereby protecting the team from the deleterious influence of AI error. We tested this in a VR drone surveillance task where teams of operators faced high workload and systematically misleading AI cues, comparing traditional behaviour-based team strategies against a purely Neuro-Decoupled Team (NDT) that used only BCI confidence scores derived from pre-response EEG. Under AI deception, behaviour-based teams catastrophically failed, with Majority Vote accuracy collapsing to 44%. The NDT, however, maintained 98% accuracy, a statistically significant synergistic gain over even the team's best individual performer (p < .001). This was explained by a neuro-behavioural decoupling, where the BCI's predictions remained highly accurate while the operator's subjective confidence became an unreliable signal. We conclude that an implicit BCI provides resilience by learning to adapt its neural strategy, shifting from relying on signals of efficient, autopilot processing in simple conditions to interpreting signatures of effortful deliberation when confronted with cognitive conflict. This demonstrates a system that leverages the context of the neural signal to defend against AI-induced error in high-stakes environments.