Change blindness and situation awareness in a police C2 environment.

We conducted a field study at the British Transport Police (BTP) Control Room in London to evaluate three hypotheses: that operators in a command and control environment miss changes; that missing changing information affects Situation Awareness (SA); and that interruptions affect operators' ability to detect changes. Our results showed that if a controller's attention was drawn away, reading an immediately available log was sufficient for detection and understanding of relevant changes. Thorough incident logging in a well highlighted display was found to be an excellent recovery tool. However, a number of issues emerged about the operators' integration of information and spatial understanding requirements to maintain situation awareness during these incidents. A hypothesis that emerged from this study is that change blindness could occur in environments with graphical-tactical interfaces as opposed to the text-based ones used by the BTP. This paper suggests that BTP operators' critical challenge is the integration of information and the need for spatial understanding to maintain situation awareness rather than the detection of visual changes per se