Capturing the dynamics of attention control from individual to distributed systems: the shape of models to come

Abstract

New technology presents opportunities for enhancing the performance of human systems that are tasked to meet multiple, often competing demands. Yet, mistakes in designing and deploying these technologies can create complexities that make human systems more brittle. To many stakeholders, the answer to this challenge is increase situation awareness. But what these advocates refer to when they talk about enhancing situation awareness varies tremendously. Over 15 years ago, the authors commented on how the label was ill defined. Today, the label is more popular than ever but the range of situations and the kinds of awareness are now so diverse that the label is better referred to as multiply defined. This paper returns to basic concepts and findings about human perception and the control of attention and the critical role that these processes play in individual as well as joint and distributed activity–how people know where to focus next in changing situations. This paper also briefly reviews recent studies on the neurobiology of the control of attention that help explain how people find what is relevant despite the fact that this is highly context sensitive. Together, the findings from this research can be synthesised into new models that capture how human systems can fluently and dynamically shift focus as context, goals and situations change. These models are needed to be able to understand, predict and support the processes involved in assessing situations and achieving situation awareness. They can be scaled up to address environments where technology is used to extend human perception into distant scenes and where technology connects multiple interdependent agents (both human groups and machine agents) over new temporal and spatial scales.