Situation awareness as judgment II: Experimental demonstration

A demonstration of the utility of a judgment analysis approach to measuring and modeling situation awareness (SA) is presented based on data collected using laboratory simulation. The experimental task required submarine stealth judgments to be made in an uncertain environment. Applying the model to a comparison of baseline versus perceptually enhanced interface conditions revealed that display enhancement had both positive and negative effects on SA. Enhancement improved the consistency with which operators ( N = 16) perceptually acquired information while also increasing regression bias, suggesting that enhanced cue perception was accompanied by overly severe assessments made on the basis of these cues. The model was also used as the basis for a post-hoc diagnosis of the factors discriminating high and low performers. These factors were found to be the consistency of cue perception and the ability to consistently apply task knowledge, rather than having task knowledge per se. These findings demonstrate the utility of our judgment-based approach to measuring and modeling SA in interface-mediated, uncertain environments. Relevance to industry: Good situation awareness implies a high correlation between actual and judged system states. This paper demonstrates a technique for decomposing this correlation into seven independent factors using data collected in a laboratory simulation of a submarine stealth judgment task.