Introduction to Situation Awareness

Prof. A. Ferworn

Department of Computer Science Faculty of Engineering,

Architecture and Science

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 Topics
• What is Situation Awareness
• Why this is important
• Some History
• Some Theory
– Mental Models
– Theoretical Framework

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 Situation Awareness
• The perception of
environmental elements
within a volume of time
and space,
• The comprehension of
their meaning
• The projection of their
status in the near future.

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"the perception of 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, M.R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic
systems. Human Factors 37(1), 32–64

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 Who Cares?
• SA concerned with perception of
the environment
• Critical to decision-makers in
complex, dynamic areas
– aviation,
– air traffic control,
– power plant operations,
– military command and control, and
– emergency services such as fire
fighting and policing
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 Consequences of Poor SA
• Lacking or inadequate SA
has been identified as
one of the primary factors
in accidents attributed to
human error.
• SA is especially important
in areas where
– information flow is fast
– poor decisions may lead to
serious consequences

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 Deep Roots in Military History
• military theory—it is recognizable in Sun Tzu's Art of
War.
• traced to World War I, where it was recognized as a
crucial component for crews in military aircraft
• used by United States Air Force (USAF) fighter aircrew
returning from war in Korea and Vietnam
• good SA seen as the decisive factor in air-to-air combat
engagements.
– Survival in a dogfight consisted of
• observing the opponent's current move
• anticipating his next move a fraction of a second before he could
observe and anticipate his own.
• Acting on this
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 The OODA Loop
• Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
• Attributed to US Fighter Pilot and
Theorist John Boyd
• the winning strategy is to "get inside"
your opponent's OODA loop,
– not just by making your own decisions quicker,
but also by having better SA than the opponent,
and even changing the situation in ways that
the opponent cannot monitor or even
comprehend.
• Losing one's own SA, in contrast,
equates to being "out of the loop."
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7
 Mental Models
• Accurate mental models needed to achieve SA
• mental model:
– Set of well-defined, and dynamic knowledge structures
developed over time from experience
• Too much data overwhelms the capabilities of novice
decision makers
– Resut ==information overload and worse outcomes.
• Experienced decision makers – faster and more accurate
using models
– Use long-term memory
• Cues in the environment activate these mental models,
which in turn guide their decision making process.

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Accurate mental models are one of the prerequisites for achieving SA (Endsley &
Jones, 1997; Sarter & Woods, 1991). A mental model can be described as a set of
well-defined, highly-organized yet dynamic knowledge structures developed over
time from experience (Glaser, 1989; Kozlowski, 1998). The volume of available data
inherent in complex operational environments can overwhelm the capability of
novice decision makers to attend, process, and integrate this information efficiently,
resulting in information overload and negatively impacting their SA (Endsley, 1997).
In contrast, experienced decision makers assess and interpret the current situation
(Level 1 and 2 SA) and select an appropriate action based on conceptual patterns
stored in their long-term memory as "mental models" (Serfaty, MacMillan, Entin, &
Entin, 1997). Cues in the environment activate these mental models, which in turn
guide their decision making process.

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 Theoretical Framework
• Most common framework
proposed by Mica Endsley in
1995.
– Toward a theory of situation
awareness in dynamic systems.
Human Factors 37(1), 32–64.
• Endsley’s framework illustrates
three stages of SA
– Perception, Comprehension and
Projection

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 Perception (Level 1 SA)
• Must perceive
– attributes, and dynamics
of relevant elements in the
environment.
• Process cues, simple
recognition, awareness
of multiple situational
elements
• These are the building
blocks
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Perception (Level 1 SA): The first step in achieving SA is to perceive the status,
attributes, and dynamics of relevant elements in the environment. Thus, Level 1 SA,
the most basic level of SA, involves the processes of monitoring, cue detection, and
simple recognition, which lead to an awareness of multiple situational elements
(objects, events, people, systems, environmental factors) and their current states
(locations, conditions, modes, actions).

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 Comprehension (Level 2 SA)
• synthesis of
representation through
pattern recognition,
interpretation, and
evaluation.
• Integrating information to
to form understanding of
how it will impact upon
the individual's goals and
objectives.
• Here you Build your
Model

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Comprehension (Level 2 SA): The next step in SA formation involves a synthesis

of disjointed Level 1 SA elements through the processes of pattern recognition,
interpretation, and evaluation. Level 2 SA requires integrating this information to
understand how it will impact upon the individual's goals and objectives. This
includes developing a comprehensive picture of the world, or of that portion of the
world of concern to the individual.

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 Projection (Level 3 SA)
• project the future actions of
the elements in the
environment.
• Achieved through
knowledge of the situation
and then extrapolating this
information forward in time
to determine affects on
future states of the
environment.
• Here you set your model in
motion and make
predictions
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Projection (Level 3 SA): The third and highest level of SA involves the ability to
project the future actions of the elements in the environment. Level 3 SA is
achieved through knowledge of the status and dynamics of the elements and
comprehension of the situation (Levels 1 and 2 SA), and then extrapolating this
information forward in time to determine how it will affect future states of the
operational environment.

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 Team SA
• Must consider SA of the team
as a whole.
• A team can be defined as:
– "a distinguishable set of two or more
people who interact dynamically,
interdependently and adaptively
toward a common and valued
goal/objective/mission, who have each
been assigned specific roles or
functions to perform, and who have a
limited life span of membership.“

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n many systems and organizations, people work not just as individuals, but as
members of a team. Thus, it is necessary to consider the SA of not just individual
team members, but also the SA of the team as a whole. To begin to understand
what is needed for SA within teams, it is first necessary to clearly define what
constitutes a team. A team is not just any group of individuals; rather teams have a
few defining characteristics. As defined by Salas et al. (1992), a team is:
"a distinguishable set of two or more people who interact dynamically,
interdependently and adaptively toward a common and valued
goal/objective/mission, who have each been assigned specific roles or functions to
perform, and who have a limited life span of membership."

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 Team SA
• the degree to which every team
member possesses the SA required
for his or her responsibilities“
• success of a team depends on the
success of each team member.
• If any one of the team members
has poor SA, == critical error in
performance that can undermine
the success of the entire team. .
• Each member has subgoal
associated with related SA
• Associated with each member's
subgoal are a set of SA elements
about which he/she is concerned.

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Team SA is defined as "the degree to which every team member possesses the SA
required for his or her responsibilities" (Endsley, 1995b, p. 39; see also Endsley,
1989). The success or failure of a team depends on the success or failure of each
of its team members. If any one of the team members has poor SA, it can lead to a
critical error in performance that can undermine the success of the entire team. By
this definition, each team member needs to have a high level of SA on those
factors that are relevant for his or her job. It is not sufficient for one member of the
team to be aware of critical information if the team member who needs that
information is not aware.
In a team, each member has a subgoal pertinent to his/her specific role that feeds
into the overall team goal. Associated with each member's subgoal are a set of SA
elements about which he/she is concerned. Team SA, therefore, can be
represented as shown in Figure 2. As the members of a team are essentially
interdependent in meeting the overall team goal, some overlap between each
member's subgoal and their SA requirements will be present. It is this subset of
information that constitutes much of team coordination. That coordination may occur
as a verbal exchange, a duplication of displayed information, or by some other
means.

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 Shared SA
• The part of Team SA that is in common

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Shared situation awareness can be defined as "the degree to which team members
possess the same SA on shared SA requirements" (Endsley & Jones, 1997, p. 47;
2001, p. 48). As implied by this definition, there are information requirements that
are relevant to multiple team members. A major part of teamwork involves the area
where these SA requirements overlap—the shared SA requirements that exist as a
function of the essential interdependency of the team members. In a poorly
functioning team, two or more members may have different assessments on these
shared SA requirements and thus behave in an uncoordinated or even counter-
productive fashion. Yet in a smoothly functioning team, each team member shares
a common understanding of what is happening on those SA elements that are
common—shared SA. Thus, shared SA refers to the overlap between the SA
requirements of the team members, as presented in Figure 3. As depicted by the
clear areas of the figure, not all information needs to be shared. Clearly, each team
member is aware of much that is not pertinent to the others on the team. Sharing
every detail of each person's job would only create a great deal of "noise" to sort
through to get needed information. It is only that information which is relevant to the
SA requirements of each team member that is needed.

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 Example: Royal Navy Field Gun
Competition

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 Measuring SA
• Objective measurements
– Compare individual perception
with “ground truth”
• Subjective measurements
– Individuals asked to rate their
own SA on some scale
• Performance measures
– Infer SA by end result

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Measurement of situation awareness

While the SA construct has been widely researched, the multivariate nature of SA poses a considerable challenge to its
quantification and measurement (for a detailed discussion on SA measurement, see Endsley & Garland, 2000; Fracker,
1991a; 1991b). In general, techniques vary in terms of direct measurement of SA (e.g., objective real-time probes or
subjective questionnaires assessing perceived SA) or methods that infer SA based on operator behavior or performance.
Direct measures are typically considered to be "product-oriented" in that these techniques assess an SA outcome; inferred
measures are considered to be "process-oriented," focusing on the underlying processes or mechanisms required to achieve
SA (Graham & Matthews, 2000). These SA measurement approaches are further described next.

Objective measures of SA
Objective measures directly assess SA by comparing an individual's perceptions of the situation or environment to some
"ground truth" reality. Specifically, objective measures collect data from the individual on his or her perceptions of the
situation and compare them to what is actually happening to score the accuracy of their SA at a given moment in time. Thus,
this type of assessment provides a direct measure of SA and does not require operators or observers to make judgments
about situational knowledge on the basis of incomplete information. Objective measures can be gathered in one of three
ways: real-time as the task is completed (e.g., "real-time probes" presented as open questions embedded as verbal
communications during the task – Jones & Endsley, 2000), during an interruption in task performance (e.g., Situation
Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) – Endsley, 1995a, or the WOMBAT Situational Awareness and Stress
Tolerance Test mostly used in aviation since the late 1980s and often called HUPEX in Europe), or post-test following
completion of the task.

Subjective measures of SA
Subjective measures directly assess SA by asking individuals to rate their own or the observed SA of individuals on an
anchored scale (e.g., Participant Situation Awareness Questionnaire (PSAQ) – Strater, Endsley, Pleban, & Matthews, 2001;
the Situation Awareness Rating Technique (SART) – Taylor, 1989). Subjective measures of SA are attractive in that they are
relatively straightforward and easy to administer. However, several limitations should be noted. Individuals making subjective
assessments of their own SA are often unaware of information they do not know (the "unknown unknowns"). Subjective
measures also tend to be global in nature, and, as such, do not fully exploit the multivariate nature of SA to provide the
detailed diagnostics available with objective measures. Nevertheless, self-ratings may be useful in that they can provide an
assessment of operators' degree of confidence in their SA and their own performance. Measuring how SA is perceived by
the operator may provide information as important as the operator's actual SA, since errors in perceived SA quality (over-
confidence or under-confidence in SA) may have just as harmful an effect on an individual's or team's decision-making as
errors in their actual SA (Endsley, 1998).
Subjective estimates of an individual's SA may also be made by experienced observers (e.g., peers, commanders, or trained
external experts). These observer ratings may be somewhat superior to self-ratings of SA because more information about
the true state of the environment is usually available to the observer than to the operator, who may be focused on performing
the task (i.e., trained observers may have more complete knowledge of the situation). However, observers have only limited
knowledge about the operator's concept of the situation and cannot have complete insight into the mental state of the
individual being evaluated. Thus, observers are forced to rely more on operators'observable actions and verbalizations in
order to infer their level of SA. In this case, such actions and verbalizations are best assessed
using performance and behavioral measures of SA, as described next.

Performance and behavioral measures of SA

Performance measures "infer" SA from the end result (i.e., task performance outcomes), based on the assumption that better
performance indicates better SA. Common performance metrics include quantity of output or productivity level, time to
perform the task or respond to an event, and the accuracy of the response or, conversely, the number of errors committed. 17
The main advantage of performance measures is that these can be collected objectively and without disrupting task
 Test Your SA

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