The role of expertise, working memory capacity, and long-term memory retrieval structure in situation awareness

This research examined the nature of individual differences in working memory and their roles in performing a flight situation awareness (SA) task. The major research question was whether the locus of individual differences in SA performance was the individual differences in capacity to maintain presented information in working memory or acquired skills to encode the information in accessible form in long-term memory (LTM). To address this question, this research consisted of three phases of experiment. Phase 1 developed measures of working memory capacity that were used a set of performance predictors. Phase 2 developed measures of acquired long-term working memory (LT-WM) skills to generate and use LTM retrieval structures as another set of performance predictors. In Phase 3, performance measures of SA were obtained and the ability of the capacity and LT-WM skill measures to predict individual differences in SA performance was determined. The results from this experiment suggested that both working memory capacity and LT-WM skills were important predictors of SA performance. However, the roles of these predictors varied as a function of expertise. Working memory capacity was the most predictive of SA performance for novices, while LT-WM skills were for experts. The capacity and LT-WM skills interacted to predict SA performance such that for those experts with a low capacity, acquisition of LT-WM skills was critical for successful SA performance.