Recovery from Interruptions to a Dynamic Monitoring Task: the Beguiling Utility of Instant Replay

Detecting changes in complex monitoring tasks is important for situation awareness, yet surprisingly difficult. Interruptions exacerbate this problem. An intuitively appealing solution to this problem is Instant Replay. Users could replay interrupted periods at high speed to quickly perceive changes. Instant Replay’s appeal seems to rest on its familiarity and realistic re-presentation of the temporal sequence of the interrupted situation. However, current theories of perception, including Naïve Realism (Smallman & St. John, 2005), predict this emphasis on realism to be misguided. We compared two versions of replay against three alternative tools in a naval air warfare simulation in which 35 participants monitored a busy airspace for significant changes. One alternative, CHEX, a situation awareness recovery concept we are developing, automatically detects and logs changes into an interactive table. CHEX provided an effective representation for quickly recovering situation awareness. In contrast, realistic Instant Replay proved worse than no support at all.