What Really Is Going on? Review, Critique and Extension of Situation Awareness Theory

Theoretically, Situation Awareness (SA) remains predominantly an individual construct. The majority of the models presented in the literature focus on SA from an individual perspective and in comparison, the concept of team SA has received less attention. SA in complex, collaborative environments thus remains a challenge for the human factors community, both in terms of the development of theoretical perspectives and of valid measures, and also in the development of guidelines for system, training and procedure design. This article presents a review and critique of what is currently known about SA and team SA, including a comparison of the most prominent individual and team models presented in the literature. In conclusion, we argue that recently proposed systems level Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA) approaches are the most suited to describing and assessing SA in real world collaborative environments