Situation awareness (SA), which is thought to be based on underlying cognitive mechanisms, may be an important predictor of performance. This study investigates if adding SA to a battery of cognitive tests would improve the prediction of performance. Three performance measures taken from the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) Air Traffic Scenarios Test, the low-fidelity simulation component of the FAA's controller selection battery, were used as criterion variables in a hierarchical regression. After predicting performance based on a battery of cognitive (e.g., intelligence, working memory, spatial memory) and noncognitive tests (e.g., cognitive style, personality, demographics), measures of SA were added. Results showed that SA did provide increases in prediction, but only when measured with the Situation Present Assessment Method, an on-line query method. When the same questions were asked off line, SA did not enter the model in two cases and improved prediction by only 2% in the third. These findings suggest that since some measures of SA do show incremental validity, these on-line measures might be useful in standard batteries of tests for predicting performance.
Abstract