How Long Can an Agent Look Away From a Target?

Situation awareness (SA) is the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future [3]. Although the impact of situation awareness and assessment on humans in complex systems is clear, no one theory for SA has been developed. A critical aspect of the SA problem is that agents must construct an overall view of a dynamically changing world using limited sensor channels. For instance, a (virtual) pilot, who visually tracks the location and direction of several vehicles that he cannot see simultaneously, must shift its visual field of view to scan the environment and to sense the situation involved. How he directs his attention, for how long, and how he efficiently reacquires targets is the central question we address in this paper. We describe the perceptual coordination that helps a virtual pilot efficiently track one or more objects. In SA, it is important for a virtual pilot having a limited visual field of view to gather more information from its environment and to choose appropriate actions to take in the environment without