ABSTRACT
The concept of Situation Awareness (SA) is now well established in the domain of human factors studies in complex environments. In practice, a long list of examples exists to persuade someone that SA has its own reality and its own importance. Indeed, knowledge of the information relevant to efficient task performance is critical to safety and productivity in a wide variety of situations such as air-traffic controllers, jet pilots, nuclear power plant operators and military commanders (see Durso and Gronlund, 1999). However, when an attempt is made to define SA, the result is highly variable. Reviews of definitions from varied sources (e.g., Dominguez, 1994; Breton and Rousseau, 2001) provide a clear indication of the variety of viewpoints about SA. One might not be too concerned with that situation. As Pew pointed out:
The term situation awareness shares a common history with several psychological concepts such as intelligence, vigilance, attention, fatigue, stress, compatibility, or workload. During decades, all these terms were poorly defined. However, each became important because they attracted attention on critical processes or mental states that were previously unknown. Ultimately, they changed the ways to study human factors problems, and they brought new benefits. (Pew, 2000, p. 33)
Defining SA
Surveying definitions of SA reveals the variety of conceptions currently conveyed in the literature. Breton and Rousseau (2001) performed a systematic classification of 26 SA definitions. These definitions turned out to be evenly divided in two classes corresponding to the now accepted duality of SA as a State or as a Process.
State and Process-oriented Definitions
