Are they Shooting at Me?: An Approach to Training Situational Awareness

Abstract

This study tests the effectiveness of a training strategy to improve situational awareness skills. The training approach suggested by this study is to expose subjects initially to only those cues relevant to the task. When other extraneous cues are added, these subjects should be better at extracting those familiar cues relevant to the task than subjects who are first exposed to both relevant and irrelevant cues. Subjects trained with only the relevant cues were able to identify a significantly higher percentage (60%) of patterns than subjects trained in the cluttered environment (43%).

The results support the use of the proposed training strategy for situational awareness. Signal detection theory and state-dependent learning theory are discussed in relation to the findings.

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