Getting Back Up to Speed: Cognitive Principles for Situation Awareness Recovery

Objective: To provide a principled, theoretical basis to improve interface tools for helping users recover from task interruptions and get back up to speed in dynamic operational tasks. Background: Multi-tasking and interruptions that disrupt situation awareness are common to many dynamic operational tasks, from monitoring airspaces and plant operations to conducting tactical missions, civil emergency operations, and even fighting wild fires. Recovering situation awareness following an interruption requires detecting and assimilating changes to the situation that occurred during the interruption, yet humans are notoriously poor at detecting changes, and little attention has been given to designing effective situation awareness recovery tools. Method: We synthesize notions of change detection with previous interruption models to create a new model of situation awareness recovery for dynamic tasks. From the model, we derive four cognitive principles for the design of interfaces to support change detection and situation awareness recovery. Results: We contrast existing and novel interface tools against the principles and draw out several previously overlooked limitations and design trade-offs inherent in their designs. Conclusion: The results illuminate the cognitive and perceptual underpinnings of more and less effective situation awareness recovery tools. Application: Consideration of the principles should facilitate the design of more effective tools to help users get back up to speed for these important and high risk tasks. Contact information: Mark St. John, Pacific Science & Engineering Group, 9180 Brown Deer Road, San Diego, CA 92121, [email protected], tel: (858)535-1661, fax: (858)535-1665. Short title: Situation awareness recovery