Situation Awareness Measures for Simulated Submarine Track Management

Abstract

Defense researchers have identified SPAM as an alternative to SAGAT because it would not require field exercises involving submarines to be paused. SPAM was not disruptive, but it is potentially problematic that SPAM did not predict variance in all three performance tasks.

The Impact of Uncertain Contact Location on Situation Awareness and Performance in Simulated Submarine Track Management

“…Track management requires a console operator to coordinate analysis of the output from the submarine's passive sonar (i.e., "tracks") in order to determine the range, course, and speed of potential "contacts" detected at sea (a process referred to as contact localization). The current paper extends prior research that has examined SA in submarine track management (Loft, Bowden, et al, 2015;Loft, Morrell, & Huf, 2013;Loft, Sadler, Braithwaite, & Huf, 2015) by examining how SA, workload, and performance in track management are affected by manipulations of uncertainty in the location of contacts. This manipulation has applied relevance because the location of contacts in submarine control rooms can be uncertain due to the limitations of passive sonar and deception by hostile forces (Kirschenbaum, Trafton, Schunn, & Trickett, 2014;Stanton, 2014).…”

“…Participants also responded to SPAM queries. Loft et al (2013) and Loft, Bowden, et al (2015) found that SPAM predicted variance in performance after SPAM accept time had been statistically controlled. Loft, Bowden, et al (2015) extended Loft et al (2013) by showing that SPAM can predict incremental variance in performance after controlling for subjective measures of SA and subjective workload and that administering SPAM queries does not negatively affect performance or subjective workload.…”

Land Ahoy! Understanding Submarine Command and Control During the Completion of Inshore Operations

“…Understanding how instruments, sensors and interfaces facilitate the generation of a tactical picture during submarine operations is a challenge due to the complexity of sociotechnical systems (Loft, Bowden, Braithwaite, Morrell, Huf, & Durso, 2015;Huf, Arulampalam, Masell, Tynan, Brown, Manning, 2004;Stanton, & Bessell, 2014). The current work has provided empirical evidence for clear delineations between submarine command team operators in terms of social, information and task network analysis.…”

“…The social, information and task networks demonstrate the complexities involved when completing submarine INSOs (Loft, Bowden, Braithwaite, Morrell, Huf, & Durso, 2015;Loft, Sadler, Braithwaite, & Huf, 2015;Stanton, & Bessell, 2014;Huf, Arulampalam, Masell, Tynan, Brown, Manning, 2004). The current work offers support for previous work examining submarine operations from a sociotechnical perspective (Stanton, 2014).…”

A Predictive Model of Situation Awareness with ACT-R

“…The area that emerged as the research background of SA is aviation system. As the area of dynamic system was expanded as time went on, studies have been carried out in various areas including automobile (Ma and Kaber, 2005), submarine (Loft et al, 2013) and army land battle situations (Riley et al, 2006), as well as airplane. Researches to measure SA in various situations from full-manual system in which humans perform all jobs to full-automation in which systems carry out all functions have been conducted, as Level 2 SA is defined as understanding factors as a whole one picture, based on factors perception.…”