Mica R. Endsley

• PhD
• CEO at SA Technologies

The use of situation awareness (SA) measures to assess relative safety in driving is common, with higher levels of SA being interpreted as safer. These relative interpretations do not allow researchers to determine whether the level of SA could be considered "safe" or "unsafe". In contrast to such interpretations based on relative performance, the...

Situation awareness (SA) and workload have both received considerable attention over the past several decades. Little research has investigated the relationship between these two constructs however. The present study examines the relationship between workload and SA in a task involving operation of unmanned vehicles performing an inspection task. O...

The objective of this panel is to better understand how machine learning (ML) systems influence users and to identify strategies to make such interactions more effective when designing decision support systems and joint cognitive systems for real-time control. The panelists will draw upon their insights from the fields of aviation, defense, ground...

Situation awareness (SA) is important in many demanding tasks (e.g. driving). Assessing SA during training can indicate whether someone is ready to perform in the real world. SA is typically assessed by interrupting the task to ask questions about the situation or asking questions after task completion, assessing only momentary SA. An objective and...

The implementation of automation in many domains has led to well-documented accidents and incidents, resulting from reduced situation awareness that occurs when operators are out-of-loop (OOTL), automation confusion, and automation interaction difficulties. Wickens coined the term lumberjack effect to summarize the finding that while automation wor...

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...

Test and evaluation protocols (methods or procedures) that include human participants as a component of human–machine–computer systems are being developed and implemented in industry and academia. Human-specific testing procedures are applicable when human behavior is involved in those systems. A wide variety of factors that affect human variabilit...

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...

The National Academies Board on Human Systems Integration (BOHSI) has organized this session exploring the changing nature of an essential human activity—work. Policing, the military, healthcare, and numerous other fields are being shaped by powerful forces. The Panel brings together prominent researchers to reflect on the organizational and societ...

Human Factors/Ergonomics (HF/E) is a systems discipline focused on jointly optimizing human well-being and overall system performance. Societal problems, including but not limited to health inequity, racism, poverty, and (lack of) sustainability, are inherently systems problems that involve humans, and so recent work has argued that HF IE can and s...

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-...

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....