ABSTRACT
The objective of this research was to develop and validate an empirical method of situation awareness (SA) assessment as a basis for characterizing mental models in an inductive reasoning task with complex context. An experiment was conducted in which participants watched videos of two structured detective stories while simultaneously playing a simple shooter game. Participant SA was measured during the trial and post-trial measures included concept mapping and a knowledge test on the stories. Three different types of mental models were hypothesized to occur, including a simple list of story elements, elements grouped based on importance,
and an organized network of elements. A fuzzy inference model was developed to classifY measures of participant SA into patterns that matched with the three hypothesized mental model types. Based on fuzzy inference, the mental model type showed utility for predicting knowledge test performance. The fuzzy model outputs and measures of SA were found to be independent from concept map measures (no significant correlations). Regression analyses showed that for both stories, levels of SA were predictive of knowledge test performance. The experiment results provided empirical evidence of the utility of SA measures for assessing mental models and predicting task performance in a complex inductive reasoning task (i.e., understanding detective scenarios), independent of an existing assessment approach (i.e. concept mapping).
