When people are in engaged highly dynamic environments where lots of things are happening all at once, they may not be able to pay adequate attention to everything simultaneously. We would expect them to allocate their attention to those things they judge to be most important. This insight suggests that limited attentional capacity should limit people’s situation awareness.
In this experiment, I placed participants in a simulated combat environment and tried to manipulate their attentional priorities. In order to assess the impact of these manipulations on situation awareness, I employed a memory probe procedure in which we would occasionally interrupt the simulation and query the participants on details of the tactical situation.
Abstract
Subjects were given a “god’s eye” view of an air battle involving seven aircraft: two were friendly, either one or three were hostile, and the rest were neutral. In one condition (Consistent FFN), which aircraft were friend, foe, or neutral was consistent throughout a trial. In another condition (Variable FFN), the identity of each aircraft changed randomly within a trial. In general, subjects’ spatial awareness was best for enemy aircraft and worst for neutral aircraft. Increasing the number of enemy aircraft from one to three degraded spatial awareness for enemy aircraft in both FFN conditions. FFN awareness was also affected. These results are interpreted in terms of a limited capacity model of attention and subjects’ attentional priorities.
Citation
Fracker, M. L. (1989). Attention allocation in situation awareness. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meeting, 33(20), 1396-1400.
Dr Martin Fracker 