Supporting situation awareness: A tradeoff between benefits and overhead

Decision support and vulnerability to interruption in a dynamic multitasking environment

“…The temporal overview display (TOD; Rousseau, Tremblay, Lafond, Vachon, & Breton, 2007) provides an on-screen grid-based representation of temporal events that goes beyond a mere snapshot in time, to facilitate the processes of planning and executing complex series of actions (e.g., Potter, Gualtieri, & Elm, 2003). In a naval airwarfare simulation task, TOD was successful in promoting a time-based decision heuristic, improving temporal awareness (Tremblay, Vachon, Rousseau, & Breton, 2012) and situation awareness (Vachon, Lafond, Vallières, Rousseau, & Tremblay, 2011). Dealing with interruptions is a common necessity in C2 situations (e.g., responding to a colleague or a system alert), which must be interleaved with the ongoing task so as to minimize overall disruption.…”

“…By referring to the text in the table, it eases the burden on the operator to notice changes occurring on the radar which may be subtle and difficult to detect on a visually cluttered and dynamically changing screen. Using a simplified version of this tool, Vachon et al (2011) found that participants not only demonstrated better SA than those performing the task without support, but also possessed a more accurate perception of their level of SA. This feature may be particularly useful in the case of task interruption when the operator's attention is necessarily directed elsewhere and the visual scene continues to evolve.…”

“…Microworlds are also ideal for the study of 8 Decision support and vulnerability to interruption interruptions because they allow for a range of dependent measures which may be differentially impacted by interruption (e.g., error, time costs), or may provide converging support for the behavioural effects observed (e.g., eye movements, subjective measures). This facilitates the use of a holistic approach (Lafond, Vachon, Rousseau, & Tremblay, 2010), allowing researchers to achieve a comprehensive understanding of performance as a whole, and of interactive effects between variables (e.g., Hodgetts et al, 2014;Vachon et al, 2011).…”

“…In the current study, the task we use is the Simulated Combat Control System (S-CCS) microworld (Lafond et al, 2010;Vachon et al, 2011) which provides a simplified simulation of above-water command and control warfare practiced aboard the Canadian Navy's frigates. It simulates at a functional level the processes involved in monitoring and risk assessment and shares similarities with the Argus Prime radar task (Scholles & Gray, 2001) and the Ballas task (Ballas, Heitmeyer, & Perez-Quinones, 1992).…”

The LABY Microworld

“…For example, a gain along one dimension (e.g., accuracy) may be accompanied by a loss in another (e.g., reduced reaction time), and it is important that any support tool does not compromise performance in another domain (e.g., Vachon, Lafond, Vallières, Rousseau, & Tremblay, 2011).…”