Principal Investigator R Hansman
The use of testable responses as a performance based measurement of situation awareness is a valuable measurement technique for testing of a wide-range of systems. Unlike measurement techniques that attempt to ascertain the subject's mental model of the situation at different times throughout an experiment, performance based testing focuses solely on the subject's outputs. This quality makes it ideal for comparing the desired and achieved performance of a human-machine system, and for ascertaining weak points of the subject's situation awareness. During the simulation runs, the subjects are presented with situations. The situations are designed such that, if the subject has sufficient situation awareness, an action is required. This provides an unambiguous accounting of the types of tasks for which the pilots had sufficient situation awareness. First, this method of assessing situation awareness will be briefly compared with other methods. The use of situations with testable responses in a representative flight simulator study will be detailed. Then, because the subject's responses depend heavily on the precision with which the situations are generated, techniques for robust generation of pre-determined situations will be discussed, and the performance of a current implementation will be discussed.