Situation Awareness with the Limited Visual Attention

Youngjun Kim, Randall W. Hill, Jr., and Jonathan Gratch, University of Southern California

Situation awareness (SA) is the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future. Although the impact of situation awareness and assessment on humans in complex systems is clear, no one theory for SA has been developed. A critical aspect of the SA problem is that agents must construct an overall view of a dynamically changing world using limited sensor channels. For instance, a (virtual) pilot, who visually tracks the location and direction of several vehicles that he cannot see simultaneously, must shift its visual field of view to scan the environment and to sense the situation involved. How he directs his attention, for how long, and how he efficiently reacquires targets is the central question we address in this paper. We describe the perceptual coordination that helps a virtual pilot efficiently track one or more objects
