The importance of psychophysiological methods in identifying and mitigating degraded situation awareness

Herein we delineate the relationship between poor joint human automation interaction (HAI) system performance and situation awareness (SA) focusing on the effect of system design. Degraded SA is one reason that human users make poor interaction decisions that cause joint system performance to suffer. One key reason for degraded SA is the hierarchical design where the human user is at the apex of the command hierarchy. Within this structure the human user is not able to be fully integrated into the system, which can lead to ‘out of the loop’ performance issues. We propose that SA could be measured in real time by leveraging psychophysiological methods often used in cognitive neuroscience research. We then discuss a potential framework that could not only identify degraded SA in real time, but could mitigate these degradations. Such a framework would be successful because it would genuinely integrate the human user into the system, essentially closing the loop that underlies joint system failures.