The Development of an Implicit Situation Awareness Toolkit

Much of the knowledge that an experienced system operator uses is procedural, rather than declarative, and as a result this knowledge may not be available to conscious inspection. It is proposed that to access this tacit or ‘implicit’ knowledge, Human Factors practitioners need to employ implicit knowledge probes. This paper provides a rationale for testing Situation Awareness (SA) implicitly and an overview of the Implicit SA Toolkit being developed at QinetiQ Farnborough, UK. This CD ROM-based toolkit provides Human Factors practitioners with step-by-step guidance on how to measure Implicit SA - the aim being to supplement and enhance (rather than replace) existing explicit SA measurement techniques. The toolkit permits a user to design a bespoke test for measuring implicit SA from scratch. It guides the user through the design and construction stages of an implicit test in a self-explanatory manner and provides details on methodologies, number of participants required, experimental design, and so on. It also provides examples of previous applications for each test and imparts substantial background information pertaining to implicit knowledge, memory, and learning.