Broadening the measurement of situation awareness through cognitive engineering methods

Situation awareness (SA) and team SA are popular concepts, yet vaguely defined and inadequately measured. They involve representations of the current situation, performance resulting from those representations, and cognitive structures and processes leading to those representations. Current measures of individual and team SA focus on the assessment of performance or the accuracy of the resulting situation model at the expense of other aspects of SA, such as situation assessment, mental models, and team process behaviors. As a result, these measures fail to capture the richness of the constructs of individual and team SA, critical for applications involving training and team SA. We propose that a cognitive engineering approach to measuring SA which focuses on the elicitation of the cognition underlying SA, can extend measurement by overcoming many of the current limits. As an illustration, the measurement of situation models using this approach is presented.