ABSTRACT
Numerous researchers have described the expert’s skill at recognizing familiar situations and selecting a corresponding course of action that is “good enough”. The evidence supports the assertion that, relative to non-experts, experts are eminently more capable of making these types of decision even under temporal and/or informational constraint. Anticipation, as a form of real-time mental projection, is consistent with the idea of integrating and updating one’s situation model, and with the act of situation assessment in complex domains – an integral component of the Klein’s recognition primed decision-making model. In many other complex domains, anticipation has been studied under different guises, such as anticipatory thinking, foresight, hazard perception, prediction, and projection. When the concept of situation awareness was first popularized, it was used to describe some of the mental processes associated with a “dogfight” between aviation fighter pilots.
