From "Knowing What" to "Knowing When": Exploring a Concept of Situation Awareness Synchrony for Evaluating SA Dynamics in Teams

This concept paper presents an initial exploration of measuring Situation Awareness (SA) dynamics in team settings. SA dynamics refer to the evaluation of SA’s temporal evolution of one or more teammates. We discuss why current methods are inherently limited by the subjective nature of SA and why it is important to identify measures for the temporal evolution of SA. Most current approaches focus on measuring the accuracy of SA (i.e., What? is known)and the similarity in the context of shared SA, often resulting in rather qualitative assessments. However, quantitative assessments are important to address temporal aspects (i.e., When? and ultimately For how long?). Thus, we propose, as a complementary approach to accuracy and similarity of SA, to consider the concept of SA synchrony as a quantitative metric of SA dynamics in teams. Specifically, we highlight the existence of three latencies with high relevance to shared SA dynamics and discuss options for their assessment.