ABSTRACT
Situation awareness was dubbed the ‘Buzzword of the ‘90s’ (Wiener, 1993, p.4). Throughout the decade, it has been the subject of conferences, books, and journal articles, the focus of research projects, and a topic in many Crew Resource Management (CRM) training programs. Situation awareness theory has been expanded, research conducted, and new measures developed. Now that the decade is ending, it is time to evaluate the products of these activities. We assess the decade’s progress using two research goals suggested by Jenkins (1981): 1) increase understanding of the underlying cognitive principles; and 2) uncover facts that solve existing problems. To do this, we review the construct’s status when the decade began and the progress made by 1995. For the decade’s end, we summarize research results from one large project. We relate results to the areas of interaction, skill, and learning and recommend that they be used to infuse situation awareness theory.
