The validity of situation awareness for performance: a meta-analysis

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) is a widely used cognitive construct in human factors, often theoretically posited to be a critical causal factor and/or construct for performance. However, there are concerns that SA may not sufficiently capture the psychological processes underlying performance. We address these conflicting perspectives using meta-analysis to evaluate the patterns of associations among SA-performance effect sizes. Specifically, we focus on the validity of SA for performance—how well SA captures the relevant psychological processes for task performance. In our systematic review of the empirical literature, we coded associations of ten unique measures of SA with performance: 678 effects from 77 papers. The meta-analytic means for SA measures were all of approximately medium or lower effect sizes. The overall mean effect, while significant, was also limited in magnitude (r = 0.26, p < 0.001). Furthermore, there was high unexplained systematic variation with an enormous plausible range for individual effects (r = −0.15 to 0.60). The results indicate that SA’s validity for performance tends to be, on average, weak with large variations among effects. Interventions that improve SA may not correspond to meaningful improvements in task performance, and it may be appropriate to revise major theories of SA. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1463922X.2021.1921310.