Integrating Situation Awareness Assessment Into Test and Evaluation

To guarantee the success if network- centric operations, warfighters need the ability to extract and share critical task-relevant information to develop and maintain the situation awareness that is so critical far effective team performance. As such, the design of emerging technologies and systems must adopt a user-centric approach, with consideration for human information processing capabilities and limitations. In turn, to ensure that these technologies and systems are meeting their design objectives, test and evaluation must similarly be expanded to include metrics that assess how well system features and functions are supporting critical human cognitive processes such as situation awareness and decision-making. In this article, we address this issue, focusing specifically on situation awareness. We discuss how situation awareness assessment, at both the individual and team level, can be integrated into test and evaluation. We also cite examples from our own research to demonstrate the diagnosticity afforded by situation awareness assessment