The Relationship Between Situation Awareness And Working Memory In A Visual Monitoring Task Based On Multidimensional Displays

Situation awareness refers to how much the operator of the man-machine system is aware of its dynamic states. This study aims to reveal the memory process involved in the establishment and maintenance of situation awareness. On the basis of working memory theory of Baddeley, template theory of Gobet and long-term working memory theory of Ericsson, a systematic experimental study was conducted on the relationship between working memory and situation awareness. With the help of the measurement technology of situation awareness, the effect of short-term working memory and long-term working memory in the development of situation awareness was carefully analyzed and compared in this study, especially what roles they played and how they functioned during this process. The study on the relationship between situation awareness and working memory can not only enrich the basic theory of situation awareness, but also provide new methods and thoughts for the training of operators and offer the theoretical basis to the design of human-machine interface.The whole study consisted of four parts. In the first part, the measurement tool of situation awareness was established., and its reliability and validity was examined. In the second part, the role of the short-term working memory and its components in establishing situation awareness were analyzed, with the special emphasis on the function of central executive system. In the third part, the role of long-term working memory in maintaining situation awareness was discussed by investigating whether the subjects could maintain a lot of task information for a long time, with the functions of retrieval structure in the process of situation awareness retention and retrieval as its focus. In the fourth part, the measurement methods of long-term working memory skill were designed. The multiple regression analysis was adopted to establish the regression model of situation awareness for the short-term working memory capacity and the long-term working memory skill. The combined function of short-term working memory and long-term working memory in the process of establishing and maintaining situation awareness was deeply analyzed. The main conclusions are as follows.(1) The visual-spatial template and central executive system of short-term working memory were involved in maintaining situation awareness.(2) The central executive system of short-term working memory played the active role of coordination of elements into structures.(3) The interruption tasks had no effect on situation awareness level of skilled subjects, regardless of their intensity, or difficulty. The skilled subject utilized the long-term working memory to maintain the representation of task information.(4) The subject could usually use the mutual relationship between cues to form a hierarchical structure regarded as the retrieval structure. The retrieval structure could play an important role in the organization and distinguish information.(5) In order to retrieve the information maintained in the long-term working memory, the skilled subject could consciously recover the retrieval cue in the short-term working memory. Based on the cues, the target information in the long-term working memory could be reliably activated. (6) The short-term working memory and long-term working memory were involved together in the process of establishing and maintaining situation awareness. On the one hand, as reliance of situation awareness on long-term working memory increased, the predictive value of short-term working memory decreased. The skilled subjects further utilized the long-term working memory to expand the memory capacity and enhance the reliability of situation awareness retention. On the other hand, the short-term working memory was responsible for the exquisite processing of a small amount of information. After processing, the results were stored in the long-term working memory. Then, the coordinated representation was formed in the long-term working memory, regarded as the situation awareness.