Situational awareness

Encyclopedia : S : SI : SIT : Situational awareness

Situational awareness is being aware of everything that is happening around oneself and the relative importance of everything observed — a constantly evolving picture of the state of the environment. Situational awareness can be described broadly as a person’s state of knowledge or mental model of the situation around him or her.

Situational awareness is important for effective decision making and performance in any complex and dynamic environment.

It was originally an aviation term used to describe awareness of tactical situations during aerial warfare. It has now been adopted throughout aviation, and increasingly in other dynamic, complex situations requiring human control.

Contents

1 Levels of Situational Awareness
2 Training
3 Sources
4 External Links

Levels of Situational Awareness

A general, widely applicable definition describes situational awareness as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future” (Endsley, 1988).

Level 1 situational awareness involves perceiving critical factors in the environment
Level 2 situational awareness understanding what those factors mean, particularly when integrated together in relation to the decision maker’s goals
Level 3 situational awareness is the highest level, an understanding of what will happen with the system in the near future.

These higher levels of situational awareness allow people to function in a timely and effective manner.

An individual's understanding and classification of the situation he or she is in forms the basis for all subsequent decision making and performance. Even the best trained people will perform poorly if their situational awareness is incorrect. One study of aircraft accidents found that as many as 88% of all accidents attributed to human error had an underlying problem with situational awareness (Endsley, 1995).

Other studies have found that a similarly high percentage of human error problems stem from poor situational awareness, which often results from deficiencies in the system capabilities or displays provided to their operators.

Training

People can vary significantly in the degree to which they are able to develop and maintain situational awareness in a given situation (Endsley, 2000). Factors contributing to these differences include experience (which helps to build up relevant memory stores for pattern matching to incoming information), and individual cognitive abilities (including factors such as attention sharing ability, spatial abilities, pattern matching ability, perceptual speed, and working memory). Training programs can be used to help people develop better situational awareness by helping to build relevant skills (including communications skills, scan patterns, and contingency planning) and by helping to build a large repertoire of relevant memory stores. (Endsley, 1995)

Sources

Banbury, S.P., Croft, D.G., Macken, W.J., and Jones, D.M. (2004) A cognitive streaming account of situation awareness. In Banbury, S. & Tremblay, S. (Eds) A cognitive approach to situation awareness: Theory and application. Aldershot, UK.

Endsley, M. R. (1988) Design and evaluation for situation awareness enhancement. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 32nd Annual Meeting,Human Factors Society, Santa Monica, CA, 97-101.

Endsley, M. R. (1995) A taxonomy of situation awareness errors. In R. Fuller, N. Johnston & N. McDonald (Eds.), Human factors in aviation operations (pp. 287-292). Aldershot, England: Avebury Aviation, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

Endsley, M. R. (1995) Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 32-64.

Endsley, M. R. and Bolstad, C. A. (1994) Individual Differences in Pilot Situation Awareness. International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 4(3), 241-264.

Jones, D.M. (1993) Objects, streams, and threads of auditory attention. In Baddeley, A.D. & Weiskrantz, L. (Eds.) Attention: Selection, awareness, control. Clarendon Press, London.

External Links

[Situation(al) Awareness (SA) in Effective Command and Control] by Derek J. Smith

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.