Situation awareness (SA) has become a widely used construct within the human factors community, the focus of considerable research over the past 25 years. This research has been used to drive the development of advanced information displays, the design of automated systems, information fusion algorithms, and new training approaches for improving SA in individuals and teams. In recent years, a number of papers criticized the Endsley model of SA on various grounds. I review those criticisms here and show them to be based on misunderstandings of the model. I also review several new models of SA, including situated SA, distributed SA, and sensemaking, in light of this discussion and show how they compare to existing models of SA in individuals and teams.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1555343415572631

Situation Awareness Misconceptions and Misunderstandings

https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/1422/1/Situation_awareness_measurement_Salmon_et_al.pdf

Situation awareness measurement: a review of applicability for C4i environments.

The concept of situation awareness (SA) is frequently described in the literature. Theoretically, it remains predominantly an individual construct and the majority of the models presented describe SA from an individual perspective. In comparison, team SA has received less attention. SA in complex, collaborative environments thus remains a challenge for the human factors community, both in relation to the development of theoretical perspectives and of valid measures and to the development of guidelines for system, training and procedure design. This article presents a review and critique of what is currently known about SA and team SA, including a comparison of the most prominent individual and team models presented in the literature. In conclusion, it is argued that recently proposed systems level distributed SA approaches are the most suited to describing and assessing SA in real world, collaborative environments.

What really is going on? Review of situation awareness models for individuals and teams

Assessing operator situation awareness is a key component of sociotechnical system design and evaluation. This article describes a study that was undertaken in order to compare two different situation awareness measures (a freeze probe recall approach and a post trial subjective rating approach) when used to assess participant situation awareness during a military planning task. The results indicate that only the participant situation awareness scores derived via the freeze probe recall method produced a statistically significant correlation with performance on the planning task and also that there was no significant correlation between the two methods, which suggests that they were measuring different aspects of participant situation awareness during the trials. In conclusion, the findings, whilst raising doubts over the validity of the post trial subjective rating approach, offer validation evidence for the use of freeze probe recall approaches to measure situation awareness during simulated tasks. The findings are subsequently discussed with regard to their wider implications for the future measurement of situation awareness in complex collaborative systems. Relevance to industry Situation Awareness is a critical commodity for teams working in industrial systems. Accordingly, designers and analysts require reliable and valid methods for assessing the impact of new systems, interfaces, training programs and procedures on the level of situation awareness held by operators. This article presents a review and comparison of situation awareness measurement approaches for use in complex industrial systems and provides recommendations on the types of methods to use during future situation awareness assessments.

/pdf/measuring-situation-awareness-in-complex-systems-comparison-4i08f25i4s.pdf

Measuring Situation Awareness in complex systems: Comparison of measures study

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of information chaos as it applies to the issues of patient safety and physician workload in primary care and to propose a research agenda. Methods: We use a human factors engineering perspective to discuss the concept of information chaos in primary care and explore implications for its impact on physician performance and patient safety. Results: Information chaos is comprised of various combinations of information overload, information underload, information scatter, information conflict, and erroneous information. We provide a framework for understanding information chaos, its impact on physician mental workload and situation awareness, and its consequences, and we discuss possible solutions and suggest a research agenda that may lead to methods to reduce the problem. Conclusions: Information chaos is experienced routinely by primary care physicians. This is not just inconvenient, annoying, and frustrating; it has implications for physician performance and patient safety. Additional research is needed to define methods to measure and eventually reduce information chaos.

Information Chaos in Primary Care: Implications for Physician Performance and Patient Safety

The purpose of this paper is to propose foundations for a theory of situation awareness based on the analysis of interactions between agents (i.e. both human and non-human) in subsystems. This approach may help to promote a better understanding of technology-mediated interaction in systems, as well as helping in the formulation of hypotheses and predictions concerning distributed situation awareness. It is proposed that agents within a system each hold their own situation awareness, which may be very different from (although compatible with) that of other agents. It is argued that we should not always hope for, or indeed want, sharing of this awareness, as different system agents have different purposes. This view marks situation awareness as a dynamic and collaborative process binding agents together on tasks on a moment-by-moment basis. Implications of this viewpoint for the development of a new theory of, and accompanying methodology for, distributed situation awareness are offered.

/pdf/distributed-situation-awareness-in-dynamic-systems-2lg4z20xaf.pdf

Roy Dymott

Papers

Distributed situation awareness in dynamic systems: theoretical development and application of an ergonomics methodology