paper discusses the role of situation awareness in human decision making
- Situation awareness (S.A.) is the update end maintenance of a given mental model with respect to a set of goals
- essentially: “do you get what’s going on?”
- Level 1: perception
- Level 2: comprehension
- synthesis of level 1 elements in light of operator goals
- formation of mental model
- Level 3: prediction
- projection of future states from mental model
Decision making is performed using S.A.; poor or incomplete S.A. makes “good” decisions difficult
The more complex the environment, the harder it is to achieve and maintain SA
- Attention limits S.A. generation and management at a perceptual level
- when attention is narrowed to elements to areas of main interest, perception of peripheral elements is reduced
- stress further narrows attentional field
- small amount beneficial
- too much significantly detrimental
- A novice has less ability to generate effective S.A.
- experience helps the individual learn the process for generating good S.A.
- Interface design should be compatible with user’s S.A. requirements
- ensure people can absorb what they need to but are not overwhelmed
- S.A. vs. “context”
- S.A. is a state that is more abstract than the context
- is a mental model of context
- is how you have aggregated context
- you have S.A. in a context
- Level 1 elements are context
- How does uncertainty affect S.A.?
- S.A. model doesn’t allow for or incorporate uncertainty…
- theoretically affects at both perception and comprehension levels
- are people comprehending differently than would if had better S.A. of uncertainty?
- uncertainty leads to overload of info, shut down, narrow attention
- sometimes can be good, but not always