Situation awareness (SA) is a term that refers to aviators' and air traffic controllers' characterization of incidents and accidents as being caused by a failure to develop and maintain awareness of the flight situation. This article reports on a study of pilot ability to anticipate consequences of actions, and how this ability changes with experience. In this research, anticipating the consequences of actions on future flight status was assumed to constitute one component of the complex cognitive, perceptual, and motor events that together constitute piloting skill. The study included novice and expert pilots who completed trials in which 3 screens depicted a control movement (or movements), a cockpit flight situation, or a change in flight situation. Pilots indicated whether the depicted change was inconsistent or consistent with their expectations. The accuracy results suggest that pilots' access to mental models is superior to their access for situation models and that experts are more sensitive to inconsistent change than are novices. Overall, both groups of pilots showed performance advantages in trials with interacting control movements. The authors conclude that expert ability to organize information into meaningful units appears to facilitate future flight state projections.
Abstract