Tools for assessing situational awareness in an operational fighter environment.

Three Situational Awareness Rating Scales (SARS) were developed to measure pilot performance in an operational fighter environment. These instruments rated situational awareness (SA) from three perspectives: supervisors, peers, and self-report. SARS data were gathered from 205 mission-ready USAF F-15C pilots from 8 operational squadrons. Reliabilities of the SARS were quite high, as measured by their internal consistency (0.95 to 0.99) and inter-rater agreement (0.88 to 0.97). Correlations between the supervisory and peer SARS were strongly positive (0.89 to 0.92), while correlations with the self-report SARS were positive, but smaller (0.45 to 0.57). A composite SA score was developed from the supervisory and peer SARS using a principal components analysis. The resulting score was found to be highly related to previous flight experience and current flight qualification. A prediction equation derived from available background and experience factors accounted for 73% of its variance. Implications for use of the composite SA score as a criterion measure are discussed.

Conjunction of color and form without attention: evidence from an orientation-contingent color aftereffect.

According to feature-integration theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), separable features such as color and shape exist in separate maps in preattentive vision and can be integrated only through the use of spatial attention. Many perceptual aftereffects, however, which are also assumed to reflect the features available in preattentive vision, are sensitive to conjunctions of features. One possible resolution of these views holds that adaptation to conjunctions depends on spatial attention. We tested this proposition by presenting observers with gratings varying in color and orientation. The resulting McCollough aftereffects were independent of whether the adaptation stimuli were presented inside or outside of the focus of spatial attention. Therefore, color and shape appear to be conjoined preattentively, when perceptual aftereffects are used as the measure. These same stimuli, however, appeared to be separable in two additional experiments that required observers to search for gratings of a specified color and orientation. These results show that different experimental procedures may be tapping into different stages of preattentive vision.

Event-related potentials elicited by automatic targets: a dual-task analysis.

The role of limited capacity processes in the detection of automatic targets was investigated in a dual-task paradigm using both behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures. An automatic detection task was paired with another concurrent discrimination while the relative importance of each task was systematically varied. The resulting performance operating characteristic (POC) showed that both the speed and accuracy of automatic detection responses were affected by the allocation of attention. Reductions in the accuracy of each task were accompanied by reductions in the amplitude of a late-positive component of the ERP (P300). In addition, the latency of the P300 component elicited by automatic targets was increased in dual-task conditions. A comparison of behavioral and ERP measures suggested the involvement of two separate limited-capacity processes in automatic detection: one concerned with the formation of an episodic representation of target occurrence and the other with the execution of rapid motor responses.