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This study investigated people's ability to monitor changing spatial information in a simulated driving task. Drivers' knowledge of the locations of traffic cars was assessed with both direct recall measures and indirect performance measures. The direct and indirect measures were positively correlated (associated), suggesting that drivers' knowledge of nearby cars is largely explicit with little contribution of implicit knowledge. When there were too many traffic cars to monitor, drivers used cues such as car location to focus attention on potentially hazardous cars. When drivers had more active control of the driving task, they remembered the locations of potentially hazardous cars more accurately than when they viewed driving scenes in a passenger mode. These findings have implications regarding how people maintain situation awareness during real-time tasks and potentially for the development of dynamic tests of driving ability.

Situation awareness (SA) is a measure of an individual's knowledge and understanding of the current and expected future states of a situation. While there are numerous options for SA measurement, none are currently suitable in dynamic, uncontrolled environments. The current research explored the relationship between direct measures of SA and eye tracking measures as a first step in the development of an unobtrusive measure to be used in environments not suited for existing SA measurement methods. Results showed that the more individuals fixated on an important aircraft in an air traffic control task, the higher their SA for that aircraft. The study also provided evidence that the way operators allocate attention (i.e., distributed widely or narrowly) affects their SA, as well as their task performance. The results indicate that eye tracking may be a viable option for measuring SA in environments not conducive to current direct SA measurement techniques.

This research focused on how people coordinate the environmental reference frame of a map with the egocentric reference frame of the forward field of view to make cardinal direction judgments. In 3 studies, reference frame misalignment was found to slow response time for cardinal direction judgments and also markedly decrease accuracy. The studies also showed that people often use a nonrotational, analytic strategy for cardinal direction judgments that has not been identified for other navigational tasks, and that interface aids that improve other navigational tasks seem ineffective for cardinal direction judgments. These findings lead to the recommendation that interface aids for improving cardinal direction judgments should integrate heading information from the environmental reference frame into the egocentric frame (forward view).

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