ABSTRACT

Situation awareness, the redirection of attention amongst multiple threads of ongoing activity, the consequences of attention being too narrow or too broad – all critical to practitioner performance in these sorts of domains – all involve the flow of attention and, more broadly, mindset. Mindset is about attention and its control. Despite its importance, understanding the role of mindset in accidents is difficult because in retrospect and with hindsight investigators know exactly what was of highest priority when. Mindset, where attention is focused and how it shifts and flows over time, is critical in the incident. The post-incident practitioner debriefing leads us to believe that they dismissed the device from their mindset once it was "off" – the device played no role in the flow of their attention from that point. Situation awareness is a label that is often used to refer too many of the cognitive processes involved in what authors have called here attentional dynamics.