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

The effectiveness of virtual environments (VEs) has often been linked to the sense of presence reported by users of those VEs. (Presence is defined as the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another.) We believe that presence is a normal awareness phenomenon that requires directed attention and is based in the interaction between sensory stimulation, environmental factors that encourage involvement and enable immersion, and internal tendencies to become involved. Factors believed to underlie presence were described in the premier issue of Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. We used these factors and others as the basis for a presence questionnaire (PQ) to measure presence in VEs. In addition we developed an immersive tendencies questionnaire (ITQ) to measure differences in the tendencies of individuals to experience presence. These questionnaires are being used to evaluate relationships among reported presence and other research variables. Combined results from four experiments lead to the following conclusions: 
the PQ and ITQ are internally consistent measures with high reliability;
there is a weak but consistent positive relation between presence and task performance in VEs;
individual tendencies as measured by the ITQ predict presence as measured by the PQ; and
individuals who report more simulator sickness symptoms in VE report less presence than those who report fewer symptoms.

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Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire

The authors address the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Their approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e., national or global) networked enviro...

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Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Paul Milgram received the BASc degree from the University of Toronto in 1970, the MSEE degree from the Technion (Israel) in 1973 and the PhD degree from the University of Toronto in 1980 From 1980 to 1982 he was a ZWO Visiting Scientist and a NATO Postdoctoral in the Netherlands, researching automobile driving behaviour From 1982 to 1984 he was a Senior Research Engineer in Human Engineering at the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) in Amsterdam, where his work involved the modelling of aircraft flight crew activity, advanced display concepts and control loops with human operators in space teleoperation Since 1986 he has worked at the Industrial Engineering Department of the University of Toronto, where he is currently an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Human Factors Engineering group He is also cross appointed to the Department of Psychology In 1993-94 he was an invited researcher at the ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories, in Kyoto, Japan His research interests include display and control issues in telerobotics and virtual environments, stereoscopic video and computer graphics, cognitive engineering, and human factors issues in medicine He is also President of Translucent Technologies, a company which produces "Plato" liquid crystal visual occlusion spectacles (of which he is the inventor), for visual and psychomotor research

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A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays

We outline a model for types and levels of automation that provides a framework and an objective basis for deciding which system functions should be automated and to what extent. Appropriate selection is important because automation does not merely supplant but changes human activity and can impose new coordination demands on the human operator. We propose that automation can be applied to four broad classes of functions: 1) information acquisition; 2) information analysis; 3) decision and action selection; and 4) action implementation. Within each of these types, automation can be applied across a continuum of levels from low to high, i.e., from fully manual to fully automatic. A particular system can involve automation of all four types at different levels. The human performance consequences of particular types and levels of automation constitute primary evaluative criteria for automation design using our model. Secondary evaluative criteria include automation reliability and the costs of decision/action consequences, among others. Examples of recommended types and levels of automation are provided to illustrate the application of the model to automation design.

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A model for types and levels of human interaction with automation

Theory and models of supervisory control - frameworks and fragments supervisory control of anthropomorphic teleoperators for space, undersea, and other applications supervisory control in transportation, process, and other automated systems social implications of telerobotics, automation, and supervisory control.

Telerobotics, Automation, and Human Supervisory Control

Musings on telepresence and virtual presence

The potential of supervisory controlled teleoperators for accomplishment of manipulation and sensory tasks in deep ocean environments is discussed Teleoperators and supervisory control are defined, the current problems of human divers are reviewed, and some assertions are made about why supervisory control has potential use to replace and extend human diver capabilities The relative roles of man and computer and the variables involved in man-computer interaction are next discussed Finally, a detailed description of a supervisory controlled teleoperator system, SUPERMAN, is presented

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Thomas B. Sheridan

Papers

A model for types and levels of human interaction with automation

Telerobotics, Automation, and Human Supervisory Control

Musings on telepresence and virtual presence

Human and Computer Control of Undersea Teleoperators

Reducing the Frequency of Errors in Medicine Using Information Technology