ABSTRACT
Situation awareness (SA) is the construct routinely applied to study of requisite awareness for dynamic tasks. With roots in aviation (see van Winsen et al., 2014, for a historical analysis of the origins of SA), SA has been widely studied in domains as diverse as nuclear control (e.g. Hogg et al., 1995; Hallbert, 1997), train driving (e.g. Tschirner et al., 2013) and rail maintenance (e.g. Golightly et al., 2013), off-shore engineering (e.g. Sneddon et al., 2006), power supply and generation (e.g. Salmon et al., 2008), driving (e.g. Ma and Kaber, 2005), surgery and anaesthesia (e.g. Fioratou et al., 2010) and space operations (e.g. Chiappe et al., 2014). Understanding what constitutes SA in these domains is believed to play a key role in shaping requirements and evaluation criteria for new technology, user interfaces and automation, as well as for new procedures, such as protocols for safety-critical communications, and organisational structures. It may also be used to derive requirements for training and assessment, particularly in the area of non-technical skills, for selection criteria and as a framework for, or component of, incident analysis. SA also has a reach beyond traditional human factors elds into topics such as reading, chess and sport (Durso and Dattel, 2004; Bourbousson et al., 2011).
