Mica R. Endsley

SA Technologies

This expert panel is the second of a two-panel series marking the 40 th anniversary of “Cognitive Systems Engineering: New Wine in New Bottles” by Hollnagel and Woods (1983) and, arguably, the beginning of Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE). These experts were there at (or near) the beginning. They wrestled with the daunting issues of how to apply...

Bainbridge's Ironies of Automation was a prescient description of automation related challenges for human performance that have characterized much of the 40 years since its publication. Today a new wave of automation based on artificial intelligence (AI) is being introduced across a wide variety of domains and applications. Not only are Bainbridge'...

System autonomy and AI are being developed for a wide variety of applications where they will likely work in tandem with people, forming human-AI teams (HAT). Situation awareness (SA) of autonomous systems and AI has been established as critical for effective interaction and oversight of these systems. As AI capabilities grow, and more effective te...

The National Academies recently issued a consensus study report summarizing the state of the art and research needs relating to Human-AI teaming, especially in the context of dynamic, high-risk environments such as multi-domain military operations. This consensus study was conducted by the National Academies Board on Human-Systems Integration (BOHS...

Autonomous robots have the potential to play a critical role in urban search and rescue (USAR) by allowing human counterparts of a response team to remain in remote, stable locations while the robots execute more dangerous work in the field. However, challenges remain in developing robot capabilities suitable for teaming with humans. Communicating...

The purpose of this book is to provide a detailed guide on how to successfully measure situation awareness (SA) in laboratories and simulations, as well as many applied settings. Following an overview of the pros and cons of different measurement approaches, it includes step-by-step instructions for implementing the Situation Awareness Global Asses...

Situation awareness (SA), a person's understanding of what is happening in the current situation, is critical for performance in a wide variety of domains, including aviation, air traffic control, driving, military operations, emergency management, health care, and power grid operations. This chapter discusses SA in teams, and the factors that unde...

To operate effectively across a variety of environments, personnel (e.g., air traffic controllers, pilots, truck drivers, emergency response crews) must develop and maintain situation awareness (SA), perceiving relevant elements in the environment, understanding their meaning, and projecting their status into the near future [1]. Although multiple...

Objective To examine evidence of sensitivity, predictiveness, and methodological concerns regarding direct, objective measures of situation awareness (SA). Background The ability to objectively measure SA is important to the evaluation of user interfaces and displays, training programs, and automation initiatives, as well as for studies that seek...

Situation awareness (SA) has been studied extensively in individuals and teams over the past three decades. SA, an understanding of what is happening in the current situation, has been shown to be critical for performance in a wide variety of domains, including aviation, air traffic control, military operations, emergency management, healthcare, an...

Automation has increasingly become a part of modern system technology in a wide variety of domain areas, from its early uses in manufacturing, aviation systems, and power systems to its current implementation in transportation vehicles. Across the past 50 years, considerable evidence has mounted demonstrating benefits from automation but also many...

Objective The objective of this meta-analysis is to explore the presently available, empirical findings on transfer of training from virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed reality (MR) and determine whether such extended reality (XR)-based training is as effective as traditional training methods. Background MR, VR, and AR have already been used a...

Learn how HFES members can get involved in advocating for the science of human factors and ergonomics (HF/E). This panel will present an overview of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s activities in working to promote the science of HF/E in Congress and across government agencies. The activities of the Government Relations Committee will be...

A review of 37 studies that included both objective and subjective measures of situation awareness (SA) was conducted. Objective and subjective measures of SA were found to diverge across a wide range of measurement techniques. Reasons for these differences include a lack of meta-awareness about one’s own SA, poor SA/confidence calibration, and con...

Vehicle autonomy is being heavily promoted as a means of improving transportation safety on the roadways. This goal, however, is highly dependent on the ability of human drivers to maintain situation awareness and intervene in circumstances that the automation cannot handle. While autonomy software is improving, it remains far less capable than hum...

Objective: This article provides an overview of the characteristics of misinformation and informa- tion attack and their effects on the perceptions of the public, with the objective of outlining potential solu- tions and needed research for countering this growing problem. Background: Society is facing a significant chal- lenge from the spread of m...

Vehicle autonomy is being heavily promoted as a means of improving transportation safety on the roadways. This goal, however, is highly dependent on the ability of human drivers to maintain situation awareness and intervene in circumstances that the automation cannot handle. While autonomy software is improving, it remains far less capable than hum...

Reliable, sustained operation of today's highly interconnected electric power systems cannot be accomplished safely and effectively without high levels of situation awareness (SA). As the industry advances toward a renewable, energy-friendly smart grid, compensating for the complications and challenges that variable generation imposes on operator S...

The concept of different levels of automation (LOAs) has been pervasive in the automation literature since its introduction by Sheridan and Verplanck. LOA taxonomies have been very useful in guiding understanding of how automation affects human cognition and performance, with several practical and theoretical benefits. Over the past several decades...

In 1966, the Human Factors Program Psychology of Texas Tech University (TTU) was inaugurated. The program has been accredited by HFES since 2002, when it was one of 14 accredited programs. The panel of former and current faculty (Drs. Halcomb, DeLucia, and Endsley) as well as successful alumni (Drs. Liddell and Chaparro) discusses the development o...

This special issue brings together six papers on situation awareness in human-machine interactive systems, in particular in teams of collaborating humans and artificial agents. The editorial provides a brief introduction and overviews the contributions, addressing issues such as team and shared situation awareness, trust, transparency, timing, enga...

This poster: 1) identifies goals & information needed to support the cognitive work of primary care teams and individuals working together to deliver patient care; 2) presents implications for EHR design to support shared SA

Autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles are currently being developed by over14 companies. These vehicles may improve driving safety and convenience, or they may create new challenges for drivers, particularly with regard to situation awareness (SA) and autonomy interaction. I conducted a naturalistic driving study on the autonomy features in the Te...

As autonomous and semiautonomous systems are developed for automotive, aviation, cyber, robotics and other applications, the ability of human operators to effectively oversee and interact with them when needed poses a significant challenge. An automation conundrum exists in which as more autonomy is added to a system, and its reliability and robust...

For nearly 75 years, the United States military has partnered with human factors researchers and practitioners to improve its effectiveness by designing better systems and contributing to a better understanding of human-system performance. Aviation, for example, has been one of several domains to reap numerous benefits from this partnership. Still,...

Dekker (Cogn Tech Work, doi:10.1007/s10111-015-0320-8, 2015) provides a stilted account of situation awareness (SA) in which it is only (or primarily) used to explain away human error. He ignores the large body of work over the past 25 years that has clearly defined SA, builds a strong foundation of cognitive theory on how it works in the brain, an...

A response is provided to the many authors who commented on my initial paper for this special issue on situation awareness (SA) addressing remaining questions and observations on the Endsley 1995 model of SA. A discussion on historical perspectives on cognitive engineering and SA is included, along with future research needs for the construct. New...

Situation awareness (SA) has become a widely used construct within the human factors community, the focus of considerable research over the past 25 years. This research has been used to drive the development of advanced information displays, the design of automated systems, information fusion algorithms, and new training approaches for improving SA...

Reliable, sustained operation of today's highly interconnected electric power systems cannot be accomplished safely and effectively without high levels of situation awareness (SA). As the industry advances toward a renewable, energy-friendly smart grid, compensating for the complications and challenges that variable generation imposes on operator S...

Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) has become part of the standard tool set of cognitive engineering. CTAs are routinely used to understand the cognitive and collaborative demands that contribute to performance problems, the basis of expertise, as well as the opportunities to improve performance through new forms of training, user interfaces, or decisio...

The proliferation of network-centric warfare capabilities has led to a greater need to define and understand cyber networks. Critical systems and information sources maintained on such networks are lucrative targets for terrorists, foreign governments, criminal organizations, and competitive businesses. The very same technology that enables efficie...

Cognitive engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis, modeling, and design of engineered systems or workplaces in which humans and technologies jointly operate to achieve system goals. As individuals, teams, and organizations become increasingly reliant on information technology and automation, it is more important than ever for s...

We evaluated the efficacy of a computer-based situation awareness (SA) measurement system for training dismounted infantry SA in an urban terrain virtual reality (VR) simulation. Based on past research, we hypothesized that the SA measures would be sensitive to individual (squad leader) differences, and that the frequency of specific probes would r...

The design of systems centered on the functioning of subsystems and technologies has created a plethora of problems and challenges for the human users of such systems, including information overload, cognitive confusion, inefficient processes, and ultimately significant errors that are blamed on human frailties. Such problems can be largely averted...

Determining if military or civilian personnel are cognitively ready to perform their jobs poses a considerable challenge to the research community both in terms of understanding what is meant by being cognitively ready and in terms of developing methods to actually assess it. Accordingly, as part of a government-sponsored research program, we set o...

During the SPIE 2012 conference, panelists convened to discuss “Real world issues and challenges in Human Social/Cultural/Behavioral modeling with Applications to Information Fusion.” Each panelist presented their current trends and issues. The panel had agreement on advanced situation modeling, working with users for situation awareness and sense-...

This handbook collects and organizes contemporary cognitive engineering research, drawing on the original research of more than 60 contributing experts. Coverage of human factors, human-computer interaction, and the conceptual foundations of cognitive engineering is extensive, addressing not only cognitive engineering in broader organizations and c...

Accurate situation awareness (SA) of medical staff is integral for providing optimal performance during the treatment of patients. An understanding of SA and how it affects treatment of patients is therefore crucial for patient safety and an essential element for research on human factors in anesthesia. This review describes the concept of SA in th...

The cyber security task is an intensely cognitive task that is embedded in a large multi-layered sociotechnical system of analysts, computers, and networks. Effective performance in this world is hampered by enormous size and complexity of the network data, the adaptive nature of intelligent adversaries, the lack of ground truth to assess performan...

Over the past decade, irregular warfare has dominated the focus for U.S. military forces, requiring interaction with civilian populations for extended periods of time. Effective understanding of the impact of cultural factors and maintaining higher Cultural Situation Awareness has become imperative for success in the emerging environment. Based on...

This paper discusses the basic concepts of computer support for situation awareness. The main idea is to share “situations” by computer and human agents. Two cases of situation awareness are discussed. Some of the future research topics are listed.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction, held in College Park, MD, USA, in April 2012. The 43 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including...

This paper describes work on the development of an actionable model of situation awareness for Army infantry platoon leaders using fuzzy cognitive mapping techniques. Developing this model based on the formal representation of the platoon leader provided by the Goal-Directed Task Analysis (GDTA) methodology advances current cognitive models because...

High levels of situation awareness (SA) are critical for successful power transmission and distribution (T&D) operations. Robust and efficient operations within power T&D require that system operators maintain high levels of situation awareness to fully understand the current state of the complex and dynamically changing power grid system, and to s...

For this paper, we examine the challenges to the formalization of agent SA in the context of human (or traditional) SA and the value added by agent SA. We hypothesize about how an agent can generate and maintain Level 2 and Level 3 SA and how that should be represented internally for the agent. Additionally, we consider the relationship between the...

On behalf of the IEEE Communications Society we are pleased to welcome you to the 1st IEEE Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA 2011) in beautiful Miami.

In this chapter, we describe how effective monitoring and control of potential disease outbreaks is critically dependent upon the situation awareness (SA) of biosurveillance personnel and other health professionals. These individuals need to be able to identify and respond to an outbreak quickly and accurately to prevent the disease from spreading....

There are many benefits of university-industry collaborations in the field of human factors and ergonomics. Such collaborations can yield high-quality scientifically based solutions to industry challenges and provide unique opportunities for students to work on complex and interesting problems. However, there are also challenges that can impede the...

This article describes the evaluation of 6 different computer-based training modules created to teach skills that underlie the development and maintenance of situation awareness, a competency shown to be critical in pilot decision-making performance. The modules targeted basic skills training for low-time pilots (checklist completion, air traffic c...

This paper presents the development of a subjective shared situation awareness (SA) inventory for distributed teams. Items populating the inventory were developed to incorporate participants' perceptions on key elements of SA, including the sufficiency of shared SA requirements, mechanisms, processes and devices. This inventory was administered dur...

This paper reports an ongoing effort that supports NASA research in Airportal Transition and Integration Management as NASA prepares for the challenges anticipated with the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). The NASA Airportal Project is directed toward achieving increases in capacity and throughput in the terminal area, while mai...

Current data fusion models lack the capability of fully supporting the cognitive processes of the human analyst. The data fusion community has expressed a need to better incorporate users within their models. The purpose of this paper is to describe how to use fuzzy logic to develop a data fusion model that supports situation awareness (SA). Develo...

Timely and accurate detection of potential disease outbreaks is critically dependent upon the situation awareness (SA) of health professionals. They need to be able to identify an outbreak quickly and accurately to prevent the disease from spreading. Biosurveillance systems that focus on supporting their SA may help improve health professionals’ de...

This research details findings from Urban Resolve, a large-scale Joint Forces research effort to investigate the impacts of technological solutions on situation awareness (SA) and decision making in ad hoc teams in a military command and control environment. The investigation was conducted using personnel acting as the Joint Force Land Component Co...

The cognitive processes underlying collaboration and knowledge interoperability are challenged in team-based multi-vehicle supervisory control beyond those typically found in solitary unmanned vehicle (UV) control. This paper addresses the application of SA-Oriented Design principles to the development of collaborative control interfaces that enabl...

This paper describes active research on situation awareness (SA) as it applies to the power transmission and distribution (T&D) industry. Recent emphases on situation awareness in the power T&D industry have highlighted the lack of SA-related research in this domain. This gap has been recognized by several organizations, leading to the development...

Motivation - To investigate ways to support human-automation teams with real-world, imperfect automation where many system failures are the result of systematic failure. Research approach - An experimental approach was used to investigate how variance in agent reliability may influence human's trust and subsequent reliance on agent's decision aids....

An analysis of human error in different domains shows that much of it is not due to poor decision making, but poor situation awareness. These situation awareness problems can be tied to a number of factors associated with the system design and operational conditions under which people must perform their tasks. Following a structured approach from a...

The following study examined pilots' performance on in-flight planning tasks in non-nominal and emergency conditions using autoflight systems capable of automatically generating a flight plan. The findings revealed that autoflight systems did not significantly impact replanning, while the scenarios did significantly affect the primary performance m...

This paper describes active research on situation awareness (SA) as it applies to the power transmission and distribution (T&D) industry. Goal-Directed Task Analysis (GDTA) interviews were conducted with Specialist Reliability Analysis & Operation and Reliability Coordinator/System Operators from two large U.S. power companies to achieve a clear un...

The field of cognitive engineering and decision making (CEDM) has grown rapidly in recent decades. At this writing, it is the largest technical interest group within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Work that falls into this area of research and study is also widely practiced across Europe and in countries around the world. Along with this...

Situation awareness is presented as a fundamental requirement for good airmanship, forming the basis for pilot decision making and performance. To develop a better understanding of the role of situation awareness in flying, an analysis was performed to determine the specific situation awareness information requirements for commercial aircraft pilot...

We conducted a theoretical investigation of a complex command and control (C2) operation--the manoeuvres planning processes in Army land-battle situations, to improve understanding of how technology can best be designed to support planning and course of action development. We drew upon results from cognitive task analyses and interviews with subjec...

Welcome to the Thirteenth Annual Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Student Career Panel. This year's paper emphasizes the importance of career planning and preparation throughout the graduate school experience. It addresses tried and tested techniques as well as new ideas for finding the ideal career path and position. Early career preparation (...

When designing systems for individuals the goal is to develop a product that the user can interact with effectively and efficiently. Bad designs can lead to products that are not used, are ineffective and in some cases dangerous to the end user. Bad designs can also fall prey to SA demons. One way of designing effective products that do not have pr...

The overall objective of this exploratory study was to investigate how varying collaboration techniques would differentially influence team communication processes and task performance. Participants, as part of two-member teams, coordinated their efforts to perform three collaborative planning tasks using one of three collaboration techniques (face...

IntroductionDeveloping Situation AwarenessSituation Awareness ChallengesLevels of Situation AwarenessSystem Design to Support Situation AwarenessConclusions References