Physiological Correlates of Objective Situation Awareness Measurements

Situation awareness (SA) has been widely studied in human operator scenarios as it can have broad effects on operator performance. However, SA often develops and changes rapidly, especially during highly-demanding operational tasks such as piloting aircraft or responding to emergencies. In order to enable just-in-time interventions, systems must have access to the current state of operator SA. Gold-standard objective measures of situation awareness require freeze-probes, a metric that cannot be implemented in operational settings. In order to access this dynamic cognitive state, this work seeks to develop unobtrusive and real-time methods for estimating SA. To do so, this study collected psychophysiological, neurophysiological, behavioral, and performance data while subjects complete the MATB-II, a complex task-battery designed to imitate high-workload scenarios. The task was frozen at regular intervals and subjects completed objective SA assessments and workload questionnaires. Between these freeze-probes, task difficulty and priority were manipulated in order to induce a variety of SA outcomes. Data streams including fNIRS, EEG, ECG, eye-tracking, heart rate, EDA, respiration, and in-task behavioral measures were collected. In correlational analysis, features such as heart rate and skin conductance response were found to be potentially useful data streams for estimating situation awareness. In future work, these and other data streams will be incorporated into models to predict scores on objective freeze-probe assessments in real-time.