[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Situation Awareness
Flight instructors and experienced pilots have long held the intuitive notion that successful flight results when a pilot has the big picture, and conversely when problems arise due to pilot error, it is because some aspect of this picture is missing or incorrect. In the past decade, human factors specialists have at-tempted to transform this notion into a formal psychological construct to develop both an operational definition (i.e., a definition of the construct in terms of observable behavior) and an experimental paradigm for researching it.
An operational definition specifies a construct in terms of empirical units of measurement and allows human factors specialists to make recommendations regarding such issues as: (a) the utility of a novel display (i.e., whether or not a display assists in obtaining an adequate mental model of the relevant information),(b) the content of training (i.e., which type of training facilitates pilots' overall understanding of circumstances), and (c) selection (i.e., in terms of individual difference variables, who is best at obtaining the big picture).
The concept of situation awareness is especially compelling in the operational setting of aviation, which involves the operation and control of a complicated system in dynamic environments. The human has to integrate widely disparate and sometimes in-consistent inter-sensory input (visual, auditory, tactile, vestibule, etc.) with elaborate cognitive models of the machine and the operating environment to control the movement of a vehicle through a medium.
The situation awareness construct has also been extended to other domains such as air traffic control, battlefield management, medical procedures, and even football.
These domains share common characteristics; For example: (a) the environment is often dynamic and information rich; (b) the human may sometimes experience high mental workload; (c) extensive training is often required; (d) the problems are often ill structured; and (e) time is often....
