ABSTRACT
The two most common approaches to the measurement of situation awareness (SA) in today’s practice are the memory-probe and secondary-task techniques. Both these approaches suffer from the same limitations: they are intrusive and the act of SA measurement actually risks altering that SA. The Global Implicit Measure (GIM) concept was developed to avoid these weaknesses, and to provide a means of SA measurement applicable to realtime human-engineering problems.
The GIM is a performance-based technique that assesses quantitatively and implicitly the SA of a test subject in real time during the performance of a complex task. This paper describes the theoretical constructs and the first practical application of this technique. The GIM concept provides a powerful research tool for assessing SA in complex simulated scenarios, either post hoc or in real time, and may provide the basis for practical automated adaptive control techniques.
