A Cognitive Approach To Situation Awareness

The concept of "situation awareness" (SA) has grown in importance in assessing and predicting operator competence in complex environments. Branbury (psychology, Cardiff U., UK) and Tremblay (psychology, U. Laval, Canada) believe that the contributions of cognitive psychology to the study of SA have been unfairly overlooked in the literature. They bring together academics and practitioners from industrial organizations in order to balance theory and applications among the 17 papers presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the cognitive approach. Topics discussed include a task-oriented perspective of SA, modeling situation awareness in an organizational context, a cognitive streaming account of SA, real-time assessment of SA, evaluating interruption-based techniques using embedded measures of driver anticipation, effects of SA training on flight crew performance, and team SA as communicative practices. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Simon Banbury is currently a Lecturer at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University and a Senior Human Factors Consultant at the Centre for Human Sciences, QinetiQ, U.K. From 1996 to 2000, he was a Senior Psychologist at the Defence and Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), U.K. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Reading in 1996. SAcbastien Tremblay is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Psychology, UniversitAc Laval, Canada. His main research interests relate to human cognition and performance. Prior to his appointment at Laval, Dr Tremblay held a postdoctoral fellowship at Cardiff University, funded by DERA, U.K. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology (1999, Cardiff University, U.K.)