Situation awareness: where have we been, where are we now and where are we going?

Situation awareness is probably the most controversial subject area in ergonomics research, some even questioning the existence of the construct (Flach 1995). Theoretical debate on situation awareness is not new to this journal. Over the past decade research papers have covered the relationship with workload, trust, task demand, mental models and locus of control (Stanton and Young 2000), the common ground between the information-processing and perceptual cyclical models (Hancock and Diaz 2002), distributed team performance (Fiore et al. 2003), implications of adaptive automation (Kaber and Endsley 2004), the effects of workload (Perry et al. 2006), the differences between individuals and teams (Salmon et al. 2008) and the development of a theory of distributed situation awareness (Stanton et al. 2009). The controversy surrounding situation awareness is that people have difficulty agreeing on what a ‘situation’ comprises and what ‘awareness’ might be. These are two major stumbling blocks, and that is before any measures of situation awareness are even considered, which is another academic minefield. For a simple description of a situation, one might point to the environment, infrastructure, objects and artefacts in the world as a characterisation of the situation. We shall call this the ‘tangible’ aspects of the situation, as they represent ‘things-that-can-betouched’. The trouble is there are any number of ‘intangible’ aspects of a situation, as systems have goals, purposes and needs that may or may not interact with the tangible aspects. This is further complicated by the fact that situations may be processed and represented differently by different actors or agents. Add to this the fact that situation awareness is transitory by its very nature and you can begin to understand why it is such a problematic field for ergonomics research. Given that the field of research is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, different perspectives and approaches are offered by computer scientists, engineers, ergonomists and psychologists. Some of those perspectives are presented within this special issue. This may seem like doom-and-gloom for situation awareness research, but it certainly has not stopped practitioners carrying on with their work. In fact, it might be argued that the seemingly intuitive nature of ‘situation awareness’ has perhaps done more good than harm. Arguably, the idea of situation awareness has provided ergonomics research and practice with more opportunities, whether or not situation awareness is really being measured and assessed. At the cutting edge of research, however, our minds are focused on building and testing good theory as well as reliable and valid measures of the construct. This is the focus of the research presented in the special issue. The eight papers have been classified into four main areas, perspectives on situation awareness, team situation awareness, measures of situation awareness and future challenges.