A Practical Perspective on the Utility of Situation Awareness

different things to different people. From a theoretical perspective, much debate exists as to what an appropriate definition of SA is, what aspects of cognition should be labeled SA, and how SA can and should be measured to provide meaningful information. From a practical perspective, the idea that improving SA can improve decision making and performance is intuitive and appealing. Incorporating aspects of SA theory into practical applications has numerous benefits, including that (a) the intuitiveness of the concept facilitates communication across disciplines, (b) the inherently user-centered nature of SA focuses system design on the needs of the user, and (c) the paradigm’s cognitive modeling component provides insight for training.