Tag: Military

Limited Attention Capacity Limits Situation Awareness

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.

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How Do People Maintain Situation Awareness in a Dynamic Environment?

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.

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