A Situated Approach To Shared Situation Awareness

Abstract

Team SA theories differ in the information they require operators to have for effective coordination. Endsley and Jones (1997) stress shared SA, while Distributed SA (DSA) argues coordination involves transactive and compatible SA. Although we agree with Endsley on the importance of shared SA, we argue her account of how it is acquired exceeds the working memory capacity of individual team members. We offer an account consistent with a Situated SA perspective that claims individuals off-load information to their environment whenever possible to minimize effortful internal processing. We argue that the situated SA approach, in conjunction with Pickering and Garrod’s (2004) Interactive-Alignment Model, can explain how shared SA is acquired, relying on automatic processes enacted when individuals interact in conversations. This approach can be used to study team SA in many complex and distributed systems.