The importance of 'situation awareness' (SA) in assessing and predicting operator competence in complex environments has become increasingly apparent in recent years. It has been widely established that SA is a contributing factor to many commercial and military accidents and incidents. Yet determining exactly what constitutes SA is a very difficult task, given the complexity of the construct itself, and the many different processes involved with its acquisition and maintenance. This volume brings together recent developments from researchers and practitioners from around the world who are studying and applying SA from a cognitive perspective. The 41 contributors represent many different theoretical perspectives, research approaches and domains of application. Each chapter has a primary emphasis around one of three main topics - theory, measurement and application and examines the considerable inter-linkage between them. To bring further coherence to the book, all of the contributors received draft manuscripts of those chapters most relevant to their own. Designed to be completely international and interdisciplinary, the authors themselves present varied perspectives from academic departments and industrial organisations from around the world, and from broad applications - with contributions from researchers in the domains of process control, sport, aviation, transportation, and command and control. The readership includes practitioners, academics and researchers within human factors, ergonomics and industrial psychology; Graduate and Undergraduate students specialising within these areas during their final year.

This book examines the human factors issues associated with the development, testing, and implementation of helmet-mounted display technology in the 21st Century Land Warrior System. Because the framework of analysis is soldier performance with the system in the full range of environments and missions, the book discusses both the military context and the characteristics of the infantry soldiers who will use the system. The major issues covered include the positive and negative effects of such a display on the local and global situation awareness of the individual soldier, an analysis of the visual and psychomotor factors associated with each design feature, design considerations for auditory displays, and physical sources of stress and the implications of the display for affecting the soldier's workload. The book proposes an innovative approach to research and testing based on a three-stage strategy that begins in the laboratory, moves to controlled field studies, and culminates in operational testing.

This book introduces safety and risk analysis methods for aircraft and aero-engines, design approaches for increasing safety and decreasing risk during operation, air traffic controllers’ attitudes to mistakes hazards, theories and models of human error occurrence during aircraft maintenance processes, and damage and failure analysis for composite structures.

A comprehensive overview of different approaches to the measurement of situation awareness in experimental and applied setting, this book directly tackles the problem of ensuring that system designs and training programs are effective at promoting situation awareness. It is the first book to provide a all-inclusive coverage of situation awareness and its measurement. Topics addressed provide a detailed analysis of the use of a wide variety of techniques for measuring situation awareness and situation assessment processes. It provides a rich resource for engineers and human factors psychologists involved in designing and evaluating systems in many domains.

Enhancing Situation Awareness (SA) is a major design goal for projects in many fields, including aviation, ground transportation, air traffic control, nuclear power, and medicine, but little information exists in an integral format to support this goal. Designing for Situation Awareness helps designers understand how people acquire and interpret information in complex settings and recognize the factors that undermine this process. Designing to support operator SA reduces the incidence of human error, which has been found to occur largely due to failures in SA. Whereas many previous human factors efforts have focused on design at the perceptual and surface feature level, SA-oriented design focuses on the operator's information needs and cognitive processes as they juggle to integrate information from many sources and achieve multiple competing goals. Thus it addresses design from a system's perspective. By applying theoretical and empirical information on SA to the system design process, human factors practitioners can create designs to support SA across a wide variety of domains and design issues. This book serves as a helpful reference to that end.

The purpose of this volume is to look at the developments and changes that have occurred in the area of mental workload and its assessment since the NATO symposium was held in 1979. This has been achieved by inviting prominent researchers to survey their respective areas of expertise.Examined are the current methodologies, individual differences, unanswered questions, and future directions for the mental workload issue. Particular topics discussed include the properties of workload assessment techniques, physiological measures, heart rate variability, effort and fatigue in relation to the workload experienced during normal daily routines, subjective assessment techniques, and the cognitive psychology of subjective workload. A preliminary proposal for a cohesive model of mental load is presented. A bibliographic listing of contemporary research reports completes the volume.

Adverse aircraft-pilot coupling (APC) events include a broad set of undesirable and sometimes hazardous phenomena that originate in anomalous interactions between pilots and aircraft. As civil and military aircraft technologies advance, interactions between pilots and aircraft are becoming more complex. Recent accidents and other incidents have been attributed to adverse APC in military aircraft. In addition, APC has been implicated in some civilian incidents. This book evaluates the current state of knowledge about adverse APC and processes that may be used to eliminate it from military and commercial aircraft. It was written for technical, government, and administrative decisionmakers and their technical and administrative support staffs; key technical managers in the aircraft manufacturing and operational industries; stability and control engineers; aircraft flight control system designers; research specialists in flight control, flying qualities, human factors; and technically knowledgeable lay readers.