Situation Awareness Catches On: What? So What? Now What?

Abstract

Human factors/ergonomics professionals regularly study the situation awareness (SA) problems of pilots, air traffic controllers, automobile drivers, power plant workers, ambulance dispatchers, urban search and rescue professionals, and unmanned vehicle operators, to mention a few. The challenge has been to define SA operationally and devise measurement strategies that focus on attention and recall on the one hand and relevant actions on the other. Although there have been many successes, challenges remain. This review is organized in three parts. Under "What?" we discuss definitions of SA, their interpretations in terms of human information processing and ecological psychological theories, as well as techniques for measuring SA. Under "So what?" we introduce SA applications-information requirements, technological tools, and training systems-that support the way people work and live. Finally, under "Now what?" we discuss future directions for SA research. Table 1.1. Two Theoretical Views of Situation Awareness Aspect Information Processing Ecological Psychology Emphasis "What's inside your head" "What your head's inside of" (Mace, 1977) Key ideas for SA Mental representation, Direct perception, affordances of long-term working memory objects, events [and situations] Goal of research Diagnostics-what is noticed and Adaptation-how does organism remembered; what is overlooked learn to distinguish situations and their action implications? Nature of stimulation Sensation-based, elemental Rich, nested structure, invariants over time and space Meaning and action Derived from memory, knowledge, Perceived directly as affordances potential inference of objects and events Sources: Neisser (1967), Gibson (1979).

Research Using Virtual Reality: Mobile Machinery Safety in the 21st Century

“…For example, an eye tracker system has been incorporated into the virtual mask and can be used to record the subjects' visual fixation points within the field of view. This information can be used to assess situational awareness [84,85], an important element of workplace safety in and around vehicles. It can also be used to determine experimental lines of sight that can supplement envelopes of sight defined using models [86].…”

Drivers’ Reliance on Lane-Keeping Assistance Systems as a Function of the Level of Assistance

“…Meanwhile, SA has been applied to many areas in which operators act in complex dynamically changing environments and where automation of task processes becomes more and more prevalent (Durso & Sethumadhavan, 2008;Wickens, 2008). While the intuitive notion of "knowing what is going on around you" (Endsley, 2000b, p. 5) as a prerequisite for successful performance is most widely accepted by human factors researchers; the status of SA as a concept, its definition and measurement is still subject to an ongoing debate (e.g., Dekker & Hollnagel, 2004;Durso, Rawson, & Girotto, 2007;Flach, 1995;Gelau & Krems, 2009;Rousseau, Tremblay, & Breton, 2004;Sarter & Woods, 1991;Tenney & Pew, 2006).…”

The importance of psychophysiological methods in identifying and mitigating degraded situation awareness

“…The current lack of perfect automation means that it is necessary for a human user to maintain optimal SA (high vigilance) to be able to intervene in a timely manner, particularly in tasks of high consequence. However, vigilance studies have shown that maintaining this level of SA over time is extremely difficult [6]. Maintaining optimal SA requires the ability to measure SA levels frequently, and perhaps continuously, in order to determine when SA levels become suboptimal.…”

“…Maintaining optimal SA requires the ability to measure SA levels frequently, and perhaps continuously, in order to determine when SA levels become suboptimal. Further, it would be ideal to be able to mitigate degraded SA, but this mitigation remains a challenge [6,9].…”

“…This is because SA is a function of the human user's available attention and working memory with which to acquire and interpret environmental information [5] and when a user is 'out of the loop' attention may not be directed to the current task. Degraded SA leads to decreased awareness of automation mode or knowledge of task completion [6][7][8] and has been linked to poor interaction between humans and automated agent [1,2,7] Furthermore, this degradation can be exacerbated by excessively high or low workload [10]. Degraded SA can result in tragic consequences in high risk domains such as in military or nuclear power plant applications [5,8] Given the consequences of degraded SA, identification and mitigation of instances when it is degraded could be considered an important aim in improving joint human automation system performance.…”