Approaches to understanding, analysing and developing situation awareness

The term ‘situation awareness’ (SA) is still increasing in popularity in both ergonomics and other disciplines. A task-oriented systems perspective of SA is proposed from which conclusions flow concerning the task of ‘achieving and maintaining SA’. This paper also examines the status of the concept by illustrating its distributed and temporal complexities in the context of nuclear control room teams tackling a simulated plant disturbance and how a process tracing methodology can be used to identify these aspects of SA. Finally, some counterintuitive methods to cognitive engineering and interface design are described that can improve aspects of SA, depending upon what criteria of task performance are important, by encouraging a person to adopt a more cognitive-based interaction strategy.