Support of collaborative work in battlespace management: Shared (loss) of situation awareness.

In this paper, we report results from a large-scale military experiment with Canadian Forces (CF) officers on the impact of collaborative work support systems—in the present experiment, a set of integrated tools such as operations planning systems, joint fire systems and other logistics tools—on individual and shared situation awareness (SA). In order to measure SA and the ability to share SA, we used the Quantitative Assessment of Situation Awareness (QUASA) technique: We first analyzed SA quality (sensitivity, response bias, accuracy) and metacognition (level of confidence, and calibration bias), and then computed the level of response concordance within and across groups (three different Operational Commands of the CF). The addition of the new support system led to a significant improvement in shared SA. However, this beneficial effect comes with a drop in both objective and perceived individual SA. From this pattern of results, we conclude that there might be a tradeoff between SA sharedness and quality. Supporting the process of sharing SA through enhanced means of information integration and exchange, communication and coordination can also lead to a considerable decrease in individual SA and meta-SA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
Copyright of 2012 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness & Decision Support is the property of IEEE and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)