Special Issue Preface

摘要

Although situation awareness (SA) has only recently become a subject of intense research, it was first recognized as early as World War I by Oswald Boelke (Press, 1986, as cited in Garland, Phillips, Tilden, and Wise, 1991). Boelke realized "the importance of gaining an awareness of the enemy before the enemy gained a similar awareness, and devised methods for accomplishing this" (Endsley, 1988, p. 97). Examples can be found in stories of the celebrated Red Baron, who reportedly could give accurate re-creations and critiques of his fellow pilots even though he was engaged in a dogfight hundreds of meters away. Today the conceptual basis of SA. is cloudy. The increased research attention being paid to the construct has met with a fair amount of criticism. Much of the skepticism is founded in a number of epistemological and experimental arguments, which generally center on the assumption that it is too subjective a phenomenon to be measured objectively. Additionally, as pointed out in the antinomy contributed to this issue by John Flach, the causal inferences attributed to SA can be called into question on the grounds of circularity.