Expert and Novice Recognition of Similar Situations

Abstract

Situation assessment is crucial for making schema-driven decisions in naturalistic settings. Recognizing that some situations are similar to a specific category of scenarios underscores the classification aspect. To test hypotheses regarding expert and novice differences in recognizing similar scenarios, 28 senior naval officers and 52 junior naval officers classified tactical situations, each of which appeared on a note card, labeled every created cluster to convey a category description, and signified their criteria for sorting scenarios. Principal-components and discriminant analyses, and associated statistics, established that when categorizing situations, experts and novices used surface features and deep structures as criteria for recognizing similarity; experts are significantly more context-dependent than are novices; experts and novices do not differ significantly in the number of schemata and scenarios per schema formed or in the access avenues ascribed for these schemata; experts do not process scenarios at significantly deeper levels of analysis than do novices; and experts do not assign significantly more importance to conceptual aspects or less importance to perceptual properties than do novices.

A Review of Situation Awareness Literature Relevant to Pilot Surveillance Functions

“…Federico (1995) sug gests that situation assessment may be defined as follows: sizing up the situation, understanding the situation, defining the problem, categorizing the cir cumstance, constructing a representation of the situ ation, making a mental model of the circumstance, mentally painting a picture of the situation, or creat ing an image of the circumstances. The overlap between the construct of SA and situation assessment should be clear from Federico's definition of situation assessment.…”

“…For example, Wickens, Gordon, and Liu (1998) use the terms SA and situation assess ment interchangeably. Further, both Federico (1995) and Fracker (1988) use situation assessment to explain SA. In fact, Federico's research appeared in the special issue of Human Factors that was dedicated to SA, and he completely abandoned the term "situation awareness" in favor of "situation assessment."…”

“…However, like the information-processing model and the perception/action cycle, situation assessment is often discussed in terms of poorly defined psychological constructs. For example, situation assessments are often theorized to be a result of schema-driven pro cessing (e.g., Federico, 1995). That is, situation as sessments are thought to be performed based on clusters of knowledge (i.e., schemata) that allow the pilot to categorize events.…”

An Assessment of Submarine Approach Officer Decision-Making and its Implications for Command Workstation Design

“…EBR, more commonly known as story generation, occurs when the decision-makers find themselves in complex situations without all the required information, the information is self-contradictory, and/or certain correlating events are absent (Wickens, 1992 (Kozlowski, 1998 (Federico, 1995 (Federico, 1995 Alternatively, Beach's (1990) Framing Action Selection Criteria, Connolly's (1982) Cognitive Mapping, and Klein's (1990) (Connolly, 1982;Beach, 1990), categorizing situations (Rasmussen, 1983;Klein, 1989;Lipshitz, 1989), and using storytelling or mental modeling (Hammond, 1986;Lipshitz, 1989; Beach, 1990) are some of the different methods espoused. However, the common thread running though all of these models is that the knowledge necessary to assess and recognize situations for NDM is incorporated into stored schema (Federico, 1995). 4.…”

“…In other words, a schema is like an organized memory unit, similar to a stored computer program. These memory units can be stored and subsequently recalled using any of the five senses (Wickens, 1994 Beach, 1990;Wickens, 1992 (Federico, 1995;Glaser, 1985;Klein, 1993;Wickens, 1992 spend proportionally more time building the basic problem description than seeking solutions, 9) experts possess a larger set of stored schema, and 10) expert knowledge is structured, organized, and inter-linked to a greater degree (Glaser, 1985;Glaser & Chi, 1988 (Wickens, 1993 (Meister, 1965 (Bailey, 1980 (Chapanis, 1959 Standardization itself is comprised of two types: standardization of items on a specific display and standardization of display format (Bailey, 1980 (Davis, 1966 (Bailey, 1980). The results of link analysis are typically expressed in either frequencies or probabilities.…”