Mechanisms for the acquisition of situation awareness in situated agents

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) is the understanding required to operate a complex system in a highly dynamic environment. We evaluate theories of individual SA and the processes by which individuals maintain their understanding of a situation. We support a situated approach, which holds that individual operators make use of limited internal representation, and rely extensively on interactions with external props and tools to achieve and maintain SA. We also propose a synthesis of Durso et al. (2007) [Durso, F., Rawson, K., and Girotto, S., 2007. Comprehension and situation awareness. In: F. Durso, et al., eds. Handbook of applied cognition. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 163–194.] Construction-Integration model of scene analysis with Sperber and Wilson's (1995) [Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., 1995. Relevance: communication and cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.] Relevance Theory of comprehension. We show that the combination of the two theories can provide a more complete account of the mechanisms and processes underlying situation assessment, or sense-making, and is consistent with the situated approach to SA.