15th ICCRTS

The phenomenon of situational awareness (SA) has received considerable attention in recent years and significant theoretical advances have been made which establish that SA is an important component of teamwork. This is especially true in complex environments, such as in command and control, where the team is required to deal with decision-making problems under significant pressure. Two models of Team SA have generated interest, firstly, a model of Shared SA which describes Team SA as the level of overlap in common SA elements between team members (Endsley, 1995). In contrast, the recent model of Distributed SA considers team members to have compatible, but not identical SA (Stanton et al., 2006). Using ELICIT, an intelligence gathering game, an experiment was conducted which compares the manifestation of team SA in a Hierarchical network structure with that of an Edge network structure. In addition this study considered the type of SA prevalent in the two network structures and measured both Shared and Distributed SA. Understanding the type of SA prevalent in diverse network structures is important when considering future developments of C2.