Situation awareness (SA) is important in many demanding tasks (e.g. driving). Assessing SA during training can indicate whether someone is ready to perform in the real world. SA is typically assessed ...by interrupting the task to ask questions about the situation or asking questions after task completion, assessing only momentary SA. An objective and continuous means of detecting SA is needed. We examined whether neurophysiological sensors are useful to objectively measure Level 3 SA (projection of events into the future) during a driving task. We measured SA by the speed at which participants responded to SA questions and the accuracy of responses. For EEG, beta and theta power were most sensitive to SA response time. For fNIRS, oxygenated haemoglobin (HbO) was most sensitive to accuracy. This is the first evidence to our knowledge that neurophysiological measures are useful for assessing Level 3 SA during an ecologically valid task.Situation awareness (SA) is important in many demanding tasks (e.g. driving). Assessing SA during training can indicate whether someone is ready to perform in the real world. SA is typically assessed by interrupting the task to ask questions about the situation or asking questions after task completion, assessing only momentary SA. An objective and continuous means of detecting SA is needed. We examined whether neurophysiological sensors are useful to objectively measure Level 3 SA (projection of events into the future) during a driving task. We measured SA by the speed at which participants responded to SA questions and the accuracy of responses. For EEG, beta and theta power were most sensitive to SA response time. For fNIRS, oxygenated haemoglobin (HbO) was most sensitive to accuracy. This is the first evidence to our knowledge that neurophysiological measures are useful for assessing Level 3 SA during an ecologically valid task.
Autonomous robots have the potential to play a critical role in urban search and rescue (USAR) by allowing human counterparts of a response team to remain in remote, stable locations while the robots ...execute more dangerous work in the field. However, challenges remain in developing robot capabilities suitable for teaming with humans. Communicating effectively is one of these challenges, especially if plan deviations during field operations require robot explanation. A virtual USAR team task experiment was conducted in Minecraft with a confederate acting as the remote robot. Four explanation-based communication conditions were tested: (1) always explain–the robot automatically provided explanations for any off-plan behaviors, (2) explain if asked–the robot provided an explanation only when the human counterpart requests it, (3) pull prime–the same as (2) but participants also experienced implicit training to pull information from the robot, and (4) never explain–a baseline condition in which the robot acknowledged requests but would not provide an explanation. Results indicate that the training in (3) generated more team communication than (1), but this did not improve team performance or shared situation awareness. Rather, team performance and shared situation awareness was best supported by a moderate level of explanations and the robot pushing information. These findings reinforce the importance of designing robot communication strategies that can reduce human workload, particularly communication overhead, in dynamic and time-constrained tasks.
Research was conducted at a major airline to investigate factors related to situation awareness in aviation maintenance teams. Situation awareness has been found to be critical to performance and ...error prevention in many environments. Its role in the maintenance domain for the performance of both individuals and teams is discussed. Situation awareness requirements for aviation maintenance were determined as well as the technologies and personnel resources used to achieve situation awareness. Barriers and problems for situation awareness both across and within teams involved in aviation maintenance were revealed. Based on this analysis, recommendations for the development of a training program to improve situation awareness in aircraft maintenance at the individual and team level are presented.
Relevance to industry
The importance of situation awareness for preventing errors in maintenance is discussed as well as factors that contribute to problems with situation awareness across multiple teams. Specific recommendations for improving situation awareness through organization and system design and through training are made that are applicable to a wide variety of industrial settings.
We conducted a theoretical investigation of a complex command and control (C2) operation-the manoeuvres planning processes in Army land-battle situations, to improve understanding of how technology ...can best be designed to support planning and course of action development. We drew upon results from cognitive task analyses and interviews with subject matter experts and insights gleaned from observations of Army training exercises and experiments to make inferences on the C2 activities carried out in preparation for tactical manoeuvres. In this paper, we summarize several critical human factors issues associated with planning in a rapidly evolving environment, as identified in our investigation, and describe system design concepts aimed at addressing these challenges to distributed collaborative planning of C2 activities. We conclude with implications for the application of these findings to other C2 domains.
The implementation of automation in many domains has led to well-documented accidents and incidents, resulting from reduced situation awareness that occurs when operators are out-of-loop (OOTL), ...automation confusion, and automation interaction difficulties. Wickens coined the term lumberjack effect to summarize the finding that while automation works well most of the time in typical or normal situations, the performance problems that occur in novel or unexpected situations also increase the likelihood of catastrophic errors. Skraaning and Jamieson have criticized the lumberjack effect due to a study in which they failed to find it. I show that this claim is unsupported due to a number of methodological limitations in their study and conceptual errors. They also provide a model of automation failure that fails to clearly delineate the many barriers to accidents that are available, instead emphasizing the ways in which automation can fail technically and different types of human error. An alternate automation failure model is presented that provides a broader socio-technical perspective emphasizing the design features, processes, capabilities, organizational policies, and training that support people in improving system safety when automation fails.
X-ray polarimetry promises to give qualitatively new information about high-energy astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole systems, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray ...bursts. We designed, built and tested a hard X-ray polarimeter, X-Calibur, to be used in the focal plane of the balloon-borne InFOCμS grazing incidence X-ray telescope with the goal of observing astrophysical sources. X-Calibur combines a low-Z Compton scatterer with a CZT detector assembly to measure the polarization of 20-60 keV X-rays making use of the fact that polarized photons Compton scatter preferentially perpendicular to the electric field orientation. A 1-day test flight of the instrument was performed from Ft.Sumner, NM, in fall 2014. The sensitivity, performance and first results form the flight will be presented.
