Does Explicit Categorization Taxonomy Facilitate Performing Goal-Directed Task Analysis?

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) is an important factor that affects the performance of operators who work in complex environments. SA is defined as the perception of elements in an environment (level 1), understanding their meaning (level 2), and the projection of their state into the future (level 3). The first step to assess SA is identifying its requirements, for which goal-directed task analysis (GDTA) is the recommended technique. GDTA is a type of cognitive task analysis that focuses on the goals that a human operator must achieve, and the information required to accomplish them. The result of GDTA is a list of information (SA elements) that are categorized into the three SA levels. However, GDTA-based studies typically categorize SA elements into the three SA levels without stating their categorization rules. Therefore, this article proposes a taxonomy to categorize SA elements obtained via GDTA into SA levels. First, we present the results of a systematic literature review (N = 87) to gain insight into how analysts apply their classification criteria. Then, we propose a categorization taxonomy based on the ISO 15939 standard. To validate the proposed taxonomy, we analyze a subset of GDTA results in two cases, and the results of the analysis show that the proposed categorization rules are applicable to the two analyzed cases.