This paper presents a theoretical model of situation awareness based on its role in dynamic human decision making in a variety of domains. Situation awareness is presented as a predominant concern in system operation, based on a descriptive view of decision making. The relationship between situation awareness and numerous individual and environmental factors is explored. Among these factors, attention and working memory are presented as critical factors limiting operators from acquiring and interpreting information from the environment to form situation awareness, and mental models and goal-directed behavior are hypothesized as important mechanisms for overcoming these limits. The impact of design features, workload, stress, system complexity, and automation on operator situation awareness is addressed, and a taxonomy of errors in situation awareness is introduced, based on the model presented. The model is used to generate design implications for enhancing operator situation awareness and future directio...

Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems

How to Do Things With Words

Individual differences in working memory and reading

How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.

/pdf/a-solution-to-plato-s-problem-the-latent-semantic-analysis-4jfk7ozfms.pdf

A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge.

Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-term memory (STM) tasks. How- ever, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks. The present target article brings together a wide vari- ety of data on capacity limits suggesting that the smaller capacity limit is real. Capacity limits will be useful in analyses of information processing only if the boundary conditions for observing them can be carefully described. Four basic conditions in which chunks can be identified and capacity limits can accordingly be observed are: (1) when information overload limits chunks to individual stimulus items, (2) when other steps are taken specifically to block the recoding of stimulus items into larger chunks, (3) in performance discontinuities caused by the capacity limit, and (4) in various indirect effects of the capacity limit. Under these conditions, rehearsal and long-term memory cannot be used to combine stimulus items into chunks of an unknown size; nor can storage mechanisms that are not capacity- limited, such as sensory memory, allow the capacity-limited storage mechanism to be refilled during recall. A single, central capacity limit averaging about four chunks is implicated along with other, noncapacity-limited sources. The pure STM capacity limit expressed in chunks is distinguished from compound STM limits obtained when the number of separately held chunks is unclear. Reasons why pure capacity estimates fall within a narrow range are discussed and a capacity limit for the focus of attention is proposed.

/pdf/the-magical-number-4-in-short-term-memory-a-reconsideration-3704b9phuz.pdf

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity.

The semantic structure of texts can be described both at the local microlevel and at a more global macrolevel A model for text comprehension based on this notion accounts for the formation of a coherent semantic text base in terms of a cyclical process constrained by limitations of working memory Furthermore, the model includes macro-operators, whose purpose is to reduce the information in a text base to its gist, that is, the theoretical macrostructure These operations are under the control of a schema, which is a theoretical formulation of the comprehender's goals The macroprocesses are predictable only when the control schema can be made explicit On the production side, the model is concerned with the generation of recall and summarization protocols This process is partly reproductive and partly constructive, involving the inverse operation of the macro-operators The model is applied to a paragraph from a psychological research report, and methods for the empirical testing of the model are developed

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.468.1535&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Toward a model of text comprehension and production.

Strategies of Discourse Comprehension

rhetorical schemata to be discussed in what follows. Finally, schemata are descriptions, not definitions. The ‘bus’ schema contains information that is nor-

http://www.discourses.org/OldBooks/Teun%20A%20van%20Dijk%20&%20Walter%20Kintsch%20-%20Strategies%20of%20Discourse%20Comprehension.pdf

Strategies of discourse comprehension

This paper discusses some principles of critical discourse analy- sis, such as the explicit sociopolitical stance of discourse analysts, and a focus on dominance relations by elite groups and institutions as they are being enacted, legitimated or otherwise reproduced by text and talk. One of the crucial elements of this analysis of the relations between power and discourse is the patterns of access to (public) discourse for different social groups. Theoretically it is shown that in order to be able to relate power and discourse in an explicit way, we need the cognitive interface of models. knowledge, attitudes and ideologies and other social represen- tations of the social mind, which also relate the individual and the social, and the micro- and the macro-levels of social structure. Finally, the argu- ment is illustrated with an analysis of parliamentary debates about ethnic affairs.

/pdf/principles-of-critical-discourse-analysis-4xloscykj3.pdf

Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis

This book presents a new, interdisciplinary theory of news in the press. Against the background of developments in discourse analysis, it is argued that news should be studied primarily as a form of public discourse. Whereas in much mass communication research, the economic, social, or cultural dimensions of news and news media are addressed, the present study emphasizes the importance of an explicit structural analysis of news reports.
Such an analysis should provide a qualitative alternative to traditional methods of content analysis. Also, attention is paid to processes of news production by journalists and news comprehension by readers, in terms of the social cognitions of news participants. In this way news structures can also
be explicitly linked to social practices and ideologies of newsmaking and, indirectly, to the institutional and macrosociological contexts of the news media.

Teun A. van Dijk

Papers

Toward a model of text comprehension and production.

Strategies of Discourse Comprehension

Strategies of discourse comprehension

Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis

News as Discourse