Think about when you are driving on a busy highway. How do you know whether it is safe to change lanes? How do you decide whether the driver of that car coming out of a parking lot is going to wait for you to pass before entering traffic? How do you keep track of a reckless driver speeding and zig-zagging through traffic? These questions are all related to the concept of situation awareness.
Situation awareness is particularly important in the military, especially in the Air Force where the tactical environment is rapidly changing. In the mid-1980’s, pilot situation awareness was a hot topic, but exactly what it was and how cockpit designers could help pilots maintain it were not as yet well understood. For that reason, when I was assigned to the Human Engineering Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, I decided to try to fill in the gaps within our knowledge.
Abstract
Measures of pilot situation awareness (SA) are needed in order to know whether new concepts in display design help pilots keep track of rapidly changing tactical situations. In order to measure SA, a theory of situation assessment is needed. In this paper, I summarize such a theory encompassing both a definition of SA and a model of situation assessment. SA is defined as the pilot’s knowledge about a zone of interest at a given level of abstraction. Pilots develop this knowledge by sampling data from the environment and matching the sampled data to knowledge structures stored in long-term memory. Matched knowledge structures then provide the pilot’s assessment of the situation and serve to guide his attention. A number of cognitive biases that result from the knowledge matching process are discussed, as are implications for partial report measures of situation awareness.
Citation
Fracker, M. L. (1988). A theory of situation assessment: Implications for measuring situation awareness. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meeting, 32(2), 102-106.
Dr Martin Fracker 