Using Eye Movements to Test Assumptions of the Situation Present Assessment Method

The Situated approach to Situation Awareness (SA) holds that when the immediate task environment is present, an operator will form partial internal representations of a situation and offload detailed information to the environment to access later, as needed. In the context of air traffic control (ATC), Situated SA states operators store general features of the airspace internally, along with high priority information, and offload specific and low priority information. The following describes a method for testing these claims that involves combining the Situation Present Assessment Method (SPAM) with a web camera used to record eye movements to the radar display while probe questions are presented during a simulated air traffic control task. In the present study, probe queries address information specificity and information priority. Images from queries that are correctly responded to are coded for total number of glances and total glance duration. We argue that this technique is reliable for determining whether information is stored internally or offloaded by operators.